Every week during the NFL season, we break down the highs and lows—and everything in between—from the most recent slate of pro football games. This week, a potential three-peat was stopped in its tracks by the Philadelphia Eagles, as Jalen Hurts and Co. lifted Philly to its second Lombardi Trophy, and Patrick Mahomes’s GOAT credentials took a hit. Welcome to Winners and Losers.
Winners: Nick Sirianni and Jalen Hurts
It feels odd to say that the head coach and quarterback of a team that went 14-3 and won a Super Bowl had a tumultuous season, but it’s an accurate description of Nick Sirianni and Jalen Hurts’s 2024 campaign. Let’s start with Sirianni, who had the fifth-best odds to become the first head coach fired back in the summer and was still feeling the heat as the Eagles’ season got off to a rocky start. After splitting the first four games of the year, Sirianni was fielding questions from Philly media about his job security. Four months later, he became the first Eagles head coach to lead the team to two Super Bowl appearances. On Sunday, he joined Doug Pederson as the second coach in franchise history to lift the Lombardi Trophy.
Sirianni doesn’t call plays. In fact, he almost never has in the NFL. He’s argued with fans, former Eagles greats, and even his own players. His relationship with Hurts has been rocky at best. And if you polled Philly sports fans on the most important members of the staff, Sirianni might come in fourth behind offensive line coach and run game coordinator Jeff Stoutland, Vic Fangio, and, of course, Big Dom. It has felt like we’ve spent the past two seasons wondering what, exactly, the Eagles head coach was bringing to the table, and we still haven’t come up with a clear answer. What Sirianni has done is win football games. Philadelphia hasn’t missed the playoffs since he took over as head coach in 2021, and only the Chiefs have more regular-season wins during that span.
The elevator pitch for Hurts is similar to the one for Sirianni. There is no standout trait that separates the Eagles quarterback from his peers. He’s accurate, but not Joe Burrow accurate. He throws a great deep ball, but he’s no Josh Allen. He’s certainly a factor in the run game, but nobody would confuse him for Lamar Jackson. But Hurts has a ring, and those three don’t. And Hurts has saved his best games for the biggest stage in the sport. He narrowly missed out on a ring in 2023 when he matched Mahomes throw for throw in a 38-35 loss to the Chiefs. In the rematch in New Orleans, he played his best game of the season by expected points added. He took only two sacks, he burned Kansas City’s defense as a scrambler, and he took advantage of its aggressive coverage plan with a number of perfectly weighted deep balls, including this 46-yard dime that hit DeVonta Smith in stride and extended Philly’s lead to 34-0.
Sirianni and Hurts have their flaws—many of which are masked by Philadelphia’s talent—and both were hearing questions about their future at points this season. Hurts’s contract would have made it difficult to move on anytime soon, but there would have been some awkward conversations in the offseason if the Eagles hadn’t rebounded after their 2-2 start. Sirianni would be entering next season with one year left on his deal with more to prove before earning an extension. After Sunday’s win, Sirianni and Hurts are made men in Philadelphia. While they may not receive a statue like the last coach-quarterback combo to bring home the Lombardi, they won’t be going anywhere soon.
Loser: Patrick Mahomes’s Legacy
Super Bowl LIX was a rematch of Super Bowl LVII, but it turned into a replay of Super Bowl LV. The Eagles defense essentially recreated the defensive game plan the Buccaneers sprung on Mahomes back in 2021—rushing only four, playing various forms of two-deep zone coverage, and scrambling the star quarterback’s process—in the team’s 40-22 win. Fangio deserves the flowers he’ll undoubtedly receive after coordinating the NFL’s best defense to a Lombardi Trophy, but his game plan wasn’t overly complicated. There were no exotic blitzes or bespoke coverages designed just for Kansas City’s passing game. He had his deeply talented defense just line up and play, and it responded by completely throttling the Chiefs offense in a way we haven’t seen since the team’s last Super Bowl loss.
That loss to the Bucs was Mahomes’s worst career performance at the time. He hit a new personal low against Philadelphia on Sunday, averaging negative-0.69 EPA and 4.4 yards per dropback before the game hit TruMedia’s definition of garbage time. His 32 non-garbage-time dropbacks lost 22 EPA, easily the worst performance of his career. He also threw two brutal interceptions, with the second one coming near his own goal line, setting up the touchdown that blew the game open midway through the second quarter.
The main difference between this Super Bowl stinker and the last one was Mahomes’s individual performance. Against Tampa Bay, he was playing behind an offensive line decimated by injuries, and it looked like it. This time around, Mahomes’s skittishness in the pocket was equally to blame for his tough day (Mahomes faced pressure on 43 percent of dropbacks and took six sacks). Even before the game got out of hand, he looked uncomfortable in the pocket. He dropped his eyes early, he frantically worked through his progressions, and there were a few instances when he ran into the Eagles’ defensive line like Wile E. Coyote headed for a painted tunnel. It was as if the 25-year-old version of Mahomes, who hadn’t yet mastered the quick passing game, showed up to the Superdome on Sunday.
Mahomes played poorly, but the Eagles defense was the main driver in the blowout. While Fangio’s primary coverage call was quarters, which is generally seen as a “soft” zone coverage that aims to take away the deep parts of the field, there was little cushion for the Chiefs’ playmakers. Philly’s back seven clamped down on Kansas City’s underneath receivers, taking away short crosser routes and squeezing receivers sitting down in open voids in the zone coverage. The tight coverage in combination with Mahomes’s uncharacteristically spotty ball placement on short passes was enough to sabotage Andy Reid’s game plan and Kansas City’s pursuit of history.
Speaking of history, we’ll have to wait until Mahomes’s already illustrious career ends before learning how we’ll look back on his two Super Bowl duds. The loss in Tampa has felt like a footnote to his career thanks to his three triumphs, but this one could force us to reconsider how it should be viewed. While it won’t affect his standing as the NFL’s best quarterback, it will certainly affect his pursuit of Tom Brady as the sport’s GOAT. As Brady, who’s been in the building for both of Mahomes’s Super Bowl losses, was eager to point out this week, the loss dropped the 29-year-old’s record in the title games to 3-2.
If the never-ending LeBron vs. Jordan debates in basketball are any indication, Mahomes’s Super Bowl losses will hurt him more than if he had lost in the AFC championship game instead. His next defeat in the Super Bowl will put him level with Brady in the championship loss column, which might be enough to put an end to the GOAT debate before it really gets started. So even if Brady’s first Super Bowl in the announcer’s booth wasn’t very memorable, it will still go down as a productive night for the seven-time champion.
Winner: A.J. Brown’s Frustration
Based on how this season went down for the Eagles, Sunday’s win would have felt incomplete without at least one sideline argument. Fittingly, it was A.J. Brown who checked that box, exchanging a few heated words with his head coach following a missed connection with Hurts on a deep ball.
But just as Brown was starting to thumb through his now-famous copy of Jim Murphy’s Inner Excellence, Sirianni appeared to smooth things over with his frustrated star receiver. And four plays later, Brown found himself wide open for a touchdown pass that stretched Philly’s lead to 24-0.
The sequence was reminiscent of Brown voicing his discontent with the Eagles passing game following a December win over the Panthers. When asked to diagnose what was ailing an inconsistent Philadelphia offense, Brown bluntly stated “passing,” leading to a week of questions about his relationship with Hurts. A week later, he caught eight passes for 110 yards and a touchdown in a 27-13 win over the Steelers, highlighted by a joint touchdown celebration with Hurts. Since Brown voiced his frustration, Hurts has produced three of his best performances of the season, including the NFC championship win over Washington and Sunday’s win over the Chiefs.
Hurts’s Passing Stats Before and After Brown’s “Passing” Comment (TruMedia)
Brown’s impact on the Super Bowl victory stretched far beyond his sideline exchange with Sirianni or that one touchdown. Even his stat line—three catches for 43 yards and a score—undersells his impact. His early wins on vertical routes, including the one negated by the offensive pass interference call, acted as a warning shot to the Chiefs defense. It felt like whenever Kansas City played man coverage with a lone safety in the middle of the field, Hurts targeted his big receiver with a vertical shot. Some went better than others, but the message was sent and the Chiefs increased their usage of two-high zone coverages in response. That opened up space for other Eagles in the passing game and opened up lanes for Hurts in the run game.
Given the depth of talent on this Eagles roster, it’s nearly impossible to pick out an MVP from this championship run—but Brown has one of the better cases. The passing game was lost without him for a stretch early in the season, while the Eagles finished 16-1 in the games he finished, including the playoffs. The lone loss came against Washington in a game that Hurts left in the first quarter with a concussion. Brown’s gravity didn’t just boost the performance of his fellow pass catchers, it also deterred teams from truly selling out to stop the Saquon Barkley–led running game.
Losers: Referee Conspiracies
Eagles fans were ready to start booing the referees as soon as they filed into the stadium, and Ron Torbert’s crew gave them reason to on the very first drive of the game. On a fourth-and-1, Hurts connected with Brown on a deep ball that appeared to be the first big blow of Super Bowl LIX. But the sideline official tossed his flag, signaled for offensive pass interference on Brown, and then heard perhaps the loudest boo of the night when Torbert announced the call—which drew the ire of Brady in the announcer's booth and had conspiracists everywhere pointing at the screen like the Leonardo DiCaprio meme.
The contact may have been soft, but the penalty was fully deserved. Brown’s stiff-arm to Trent McDuffie’s face mask was enough to send the Chiefs cornerback to the Superdome turf and draw the flag. That didn’t stop football fans—even the neutrals—from screaming about perceived Kansas City favoritism. But before that talk could catch steam, the refs evened the score on the Eagles’ next drive with an iffy unnecessary roughness call on McDuffie on third down:
Similar to the call on Brown, the contact was minimal, but with McDuffie making contact with Dallas Goedert’s helmet, it wasn’t surprising to see the yellow flag fly out of the sideline judge’s hand. That was the first of two third-down penalties that extended Eagles drives; plus, there was a comically unnecessary hit from Nick Bolton on Barkley on a failed second-and-26 pass.
In the end, the Eagles were called for eight penalties to the Chiefs’ seven, but three of those came before field goal attempts that Jake Elliott made anyway. Philadelphia ended the game with a slight edge in the penalty department based on the stats that matter. The calls on McDuffie and Bolton were two of the six biggest plays by win probability added, per RBSDM.com.
If Kansas City can take any positives from the brutal loss, it’s that it finally got a chance to complain about the officiating. Chiefs receiver DeAndre Hopkins described the penalties that went against his team as “touchy” and asked the media whether that would be a major talking point following the game. Had Hopkins’s team been more competitive, it may have been.
Winner: Cooper DeJean
Barkley didn’t have an individual performance worth remembering on his birthday, but Philadelphia’s other birthday boy certainly did. Rookie cornerback and one-half of the Eagles’ “exciting whites,” Cooper DeJean, made Super Bowl history by becoming the first player to record an interception or score a touchdown on his birthday. He accomplished both feats on the same play after a Mahomes pass hit him right in the chest—surely the best birthday gift he’ll ever receive.
It was a historic cap to an impressive season for the 2024 second-round draft pick. It didn’t take long for DeJean to establish himself as the team’s primary nickelback. Playing mostly out of the slot, DeJean has provided sticky coverage, opportunistic playmaking, and solid run defense. He played a major role for Philly’s league-leading defense, and Sunday’s performance may have been his best of the season. Before garbage time, Chiefs pass catchers ran 40 routes from the slot, according to TruMedia. Those routes produced just four completions for 34 yards on eight targets. The targets produced an average EPA of negative-0.81. Passes to slot receivers were an important component of Kansas City’s passing game this season. DeJean was the key to shutting off that supply.
Loser: Drake
I started out the regular season by giving Drake an L when it was announced that Kendrick Lamar would be headlining the Super Bowl halftime show. Now that we’ve seen the show and heard 65,000 football fans belt out “A MINOOOOOR” in unison, I have no choice but to hand him another one.
Drake was going to come away from Sunday night a loser no matter how Kendrick performed. It didn’t help that the Compton rapper aced the performance and crafted it to maximize Drake’s embarrassment. He allowed the fans to finish the “certified pedophile” lyric during his performance of “Not Like Us.” He had Serena Williams, Drake’s ex, Crip walking on the stage. He teased the crowd with a brief snippet of the Grammy-winning diss track midway through his set to build anticipation. And he even wore a diamond-studded “a minor” chain to add one final twist of the knife.
Kendrick has spent the past nine months collecting Ws and handing Drake Ls. The battle, which had been brewing for nearly a decade, was over the moment “Not Like Us” hit the internet on a Saturday in May—and it was just as lopsided as the Eagles-Chiefs game. Sunday’s halftime performance was just another victory lap.
Winner: Joe Schoen
I doubt watching a divisional rival win the Super Bowl made for an enjoyable viewing experience, but Giants general manager Joe Schoen must at least get some relief from Barkley’s quiet Super Bowl performance. There were no explosive runs. No touchdowns. No game-changing plays. Nothing that gave the Fox broadcast or the millions of fans posting about the game on social media the opportunity to bring up the now-infamous Hard Knocks clips of Schoen deciding to let the future Offensive Player of the Year head to free agency and, eventually, the Giants’ chief rival. But that won’t stop me from laughing at it one more time before we officially tie a bow on the 2024 season.
Barkley finished the game with just 57 rushing yards on 25 attempts. His runs averaged negative-0.41 EPA, and he finished with a success rate of just 16 percent. Both were season lows for the dynamic back, according to TruMedia. Kansas City’s run defense was one of the few positives to take away from the game, even if it came at the cost of the pass defense. Steve Spagnuolo sent run defenders at the Philly backfield in droves. They plugged gaps with blitzing linebackers and defensive backs. And they didn’t miss tackles in the open field. For the first time all season, the Eagles offensive line lost its battle in the trenches—but Hurts’s third-down efficiency and Kansas City’s turnovers spoiled what could have been another entry in the Spags lore.
That lore started back in 2008 when the then-Giants coordinator crafted a game plan that shut down the best offense in NFL history and ended the Patriots’ bid for a perfect season. Nearly two decades later, Spagnuolo is still positively contributing to the Giants organization—just in a more indirect way.
