Philadelphia Eagles Are Biggest NFL Surprise for All the Wrong Reasons

The biggest surprise of the 2011 NFL season is not that a bad team is actually good, but that a good team is actually bad—which is the case with the Philadelphia Eagles.

During the 2011 offseason, the Eagles, already considered in the NFC elite, acquired top cornerbacks Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie and Nnamdi Asomugha.

With those additions to an already-accomplished defensive core and a high-powered offense, you had the makings of a genuine Super Bowl contender, which is what they were named heading into the season.           

Fast-forward a few months and the Eagles’ season has not gone according to plan, which you do not have to tell any major media outlet, as they are covering this team play-for-play and word-for-word throughout the entirety of this season.

One of those words happened to be “Dream Team,” which was so eloquently said by quarterback Vince Young after the addition of the ex-Oakland Raider and lockdown defender Asomugha during the offseason. The media ate that sound byte up, and Young has been ruing his choice of words ever since.

What a back-up quarterback with depression issues, who has delivered nothing but disappointment for the last few seasons doing dubbing his team a “Dream Team” before the season starts? 

I do not know, but not many were arguing with him at the time. That point did not come until after a 1-4 start to the season.

Who knew that other NFL teams would start paying attention to speedy quick starting quarterback Michael Vick? Or that opposing teams would formulate their game-plan around the electric wide receiver DeSean Jackson? Evidently not Las Vegas, which planted the Eagles at 6/1 odds to win the 2012 Super Bowl before the season started.

That may have caused this whole debacle for this now very lowly Eagles team—high expectations they could not sustain.

An NFL franchise sets fire to the offseason free agent market by acquiring just about every notable player available, and one of its players dubs his team the “Dream Team,” likening it to the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team consisting of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, etc. or the Miami Heat of 2010-11.

Then, the Las Vegas preseason Super Bowl odds were released, and a very mediocre Philadelphia team from a year ago is suddenly one of the best teams in the NFL.

Can you blame other teams for circling the Eagles game on their calendars?

The 2011 Eagles have the biggest bulls-eye on their backs since last season's Heat, who coincidentally were also proclaimed a “Dream Team.”  We all saw how that worked out for them.

By no means is the Eagles’ season over. In fact, Philadelphia has a realistic chance to make the playoffs and do well when there. They have rallied off two straight convincing wins (including a smackdown of the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday) and seem like they have regained some of their composure on the field.

However, a 3-4 start to their season is enough to call them a surprise in the NFL. No one realistically saw this coming, and how could they? 

Their roster is one of the more talented in the NFL, and they own Vick, who is one of the more versatile quarterbacks in NFL history.

Now at 3-4 on the season, things are slowly picking up, but this was a team that was not supposed to lose four games the entire season, let alone in the first five games.

We can talk about the surprises of the Detroit Lions, San Francisco 49ers and Buffalo Bills having tremendous starts to the season, but those were far more likely to happen than the Eagles starting the season 3-4 after the much-hyped offseason this team had.