The Philadelphia Eagles are on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week. Everywhere you turn you read that the Eagles are the hot team, they are dangerous, they might be the Giants of last season.
Yep, the Eagles bandwagon is growing. Swelling so quickly in fact that I'm not sure there are any seats left. From all the racket about the Eagles you'd think maybe the Giants should just lay down their crown right now.
Well, Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post has written a tremendous piece summarizing the frenzy, and why it might just be foolish.
Here is some of what Vaccaro wrote.
You know how this is going to go this week, right? The days will pass slowly - agonizingly, tantalizingly, excruciatingly slowly - and the more the time passes, the more people will allow themselves to be talked into backing the Eagles. ...
But here is what everyone should really remember:
The Eagles may be a wonderful story, they and the Chargers have no doubt brought a smile to Pete Rozelle's face in a smoking room somewhere in the Hereafter for ratifying his wish that all teams at all times should have an opportunity to dream big dreams. But the Eagles are also a team that tied the Bengals this year. The Eagles are a team that scored three points against the playing-out-the-string Redskins in an everything game just 16 days ago.
And the Giants are a team, the only team, with history in its gaze.
In the entire history of the NFL, which goes back 89 years, all the way to 1920, there have been 13 franchises that have won consecutive championships. Thirteen. The Canton Bulldogs did it first, the Patriots most recently. The Packers have done it three times, the Bears and Steelers twice apiece. Repeating is the holy grail in the NFL, because just winning once is a chore of almost epic proportions.
Winning twice?
Winning twice puts you in a permanent position of royalty. As storied as the Giants of the '30s and '40s were, as gloried as the Giants of the '50s were, and as stubbornly defiant as the Giants of the '80s were, no Giants team has ever repeated. There are 32 teams in the NFL; 20 of them have never done it. Most never will. Most would give just about anything to win once.
There are eight teams left in the NFL's postseason. Seven will be chasing a trophy. Only the Giants will be chasing history....
The champ is usually an awfully tough out.
And these Giants, by everything we have seen over the past two years, will be just that. They will be an awfully tough out.
There is only one thing that makes me mad about what Vaccaro wrote. That is that I didn't write it myself.