Eagles vs. Seahawks: Why Thursday Night's Game Is a Must-Win for Philadelphia

Tonight, the 4-7 Philadelphia Eagles take on the Seattle Seahawks. The fact that the Eagles have dug themselves into that deep of a hole after their frenzied free-agent activities this offseason, moves that were designed to make the team playoff contenders, is one of the biggest surprises of the season.

Statistically, the Eagles aren't yet out of the playoffs, but it's going to take a lot of work—and wins—for the team to get there. But if they can't manage a victory over the also 4-7 Seahawks tonight, their season is all but over.

For all of those pricey offseason acquisitions, Philadelphia has hardly looked like a fearsome team. Those high-profile players took a lot of time to come together as a single unit, and once they had managed to do so, couldn't maintain it.

Injuries took care of what the team couldn't damage on its own, with quarterback Michael Vick suffering from a number of them that have clearly harmed the team the most.

One thing that adding new players onto the roster couldn't fix are the numerous bad judgement calls of head coach Andy Reid. On a ever-warming seat for the past few seasons, he's now in clear danger of losing his job if the Eagles cannot manage more than another win or two.

He convinced the organization to spend a lot of money on their new players and guaranteed a high level of success if they could just get the right personnel. If this is the Eagles squad he envisioned, it hasn't paid off, and he's the first to take the bulk of the blame, deservedly.

Ranked 19th overall on defense (and ranking as badly as 31st earlier in the year) and eighth overall on offense, the team's single saving grace this season is the play of running back LeSean McCoy, with 1,278 total yards from scrimmage through 12 weeks.

Finding success as team while relying on the play of a single versatile back can actually work out for a team—look at the Chicago Bears, especially when quarterback Jay Cutler was healthy—but it hasn't panned out for the Eagles.

All the yards in the world don't matter if they don't result in wins, and for all of McCoy's efforts, they've been cancelled out by mistakes by the rest of his offense and a defense that's fallen flat at all the wrong times.

It doesn't help Philadelphia's cause tonight that the Seahawks defense is in the top 10 when it comes to defending the run, nor does it help that Vick will miss yet another game with broken ribs, meaning that the unreliable Vince Young will be responsible for the team's aerial attack.

If the Eagles can manage a relatively mistake-free night in the passing game, the only thing standing between them and victory is their defense.

The ultimate outcome of tonight's game will depend on which Philadelphia defense we see tonight—the bruisers they were designed to be, that we saw defeat the Dallas Cowboys in Week 8 and the New York Giants in Week 11, or the porous squad that allowed the New England Patriots to score 38 points in last week's loss.

Without a win tonight, the Eagles won't likely make the playoffs and Reid's already-tenuous job security slips even further away from him. All of the moves the team made in August were designed to make the team more stable, more consistent and, most of all, more victorious.

Instead, those moves didn't manage to cover up or mitigate issues that have carried over from last season. Instead, those issues—protection for Michael Vick, shoring up the contract of star wideout DeSean Jackson, making sure that clock management was improved and decreasing penalties—remain, more glaring than ever.

Wins won't solve those problems, to be sure, but wins make them seem smaller and more manageable and losses only serve to magnify them. If the Eagles lose tonight, it's not just the playoffs that are out of their reach, but also their dream to be one of the most formidable squads in the league.

With so much work put into building this team, it would be frustrating for the team to have to start from scratch yet again in 2012. But if they can't manage to defeat the Seahawks tonight, that seems to be one of the likely outcomes of this disappointing Eagles season.