Eagles Vibes Check Week

Talk then walk

Is this the season of the vibes? The Chiefs are going for a three peat and are playing uninspiring football lately but with Mahomes and Kelce they’ll always have a chance in every game. The Lions are an extremely talented and well coached team, but Dan Campbell is king of the vibes.

Then there are the 49ers. All offseason the vibes on this team were dreadful. The offseason whining (again), Brandon Aiyuk’s contract saga, Ricky Pearsall getting shot, Christian McCaffrey getting hurt days before the season opener and the team not telling anyone, everything about Deebo Samuels’ season… and then came Thursday night. The wheels are completely off the 49ers. De’Vonte Campbell refusing to enter the game–the second player this season to do so!–because of a grudge from being benched in Week 3 is amazing. I respect it.

Which brings us to Sunday.

Vibes vs Vibes

Brandon Graham said that AJ Brown and Jalen Hurts no longer get along. He also said they get along just fine. Whatever the actual status of their relationship is, please do not put in the paper that they got mad.

Nick Sirianni, who oversaw a vibes collapse so epic that the team was a joke around the league last year, insists the vibes are just fine this year. Whatever the actual vibes on the team are, please do not put in the paper that they got mad.

Eagles vs Steelers is not Pennsylvania vs Pennsylvania. It is not a matchup of the 2nd best record in the NFC vs the 2nd best record in the AFC. It is vibes vs vibes. Whatever the vibes of the team are now, they’re going to be put to the test against the Steelers.

Because the Steelers do not care. Vibes are never an issue under Mike Tomlin. They have their share of bumps in the road, but this is the steadiest hand in football. Diontae Johnson has played just 17 and notoriously not 18 snaps for the Ravens with 0 catches since Tomlin shaded him in a press conference. Kenny Pickett became an Eagle four days after telling Tomlin he wasn’t happy about Russell Wilson being QB1 in OTAs.

If the Eagles, at home, beat the Steelers, who are missing some key players, they’ll have walked the walk this week. But if they don’t, if we get another slow start by the offense, another miserable Jalen Hurts passing performance, another game where AJ Brown is targeted only 4 or 5 times, if we get an overdue Jalen Hurts turnover game–he has never gone five games in a row without a turnover, he’s currently gone four in a row. That’s when we’ll see what this team is made of.

Speaking of vibes…. eternally sullen Bill Belichick is coaching in college now? Good luck with that.

Over the Chapel Bill

Bill Belichick is a great tactical coach, lousy talent evaluator, and awful relationship builder. He not only has no college experience, he admitted in his press conference that prior to this year he only watched college football when he had to for draft preparation. His coaching network is tiny, the last coach he hired as a coordinator or position coach that didn’t play or coach under him or one of his disciples was 2014. His first hire at UNC was hanger on extraordinaire Michael Lombardi. These are ingredients for failure.

I have a hard time seeing Belichick meeting the expectations UNC has set for themselves. Win 9 games, be a consistent bowl team? Sure, he can do that, but that’s not the level of financial commitment that is being made. With a $10M coach, $10M assistant salary pool, and $20M NIL/revenue sharing investment, UNC is now spending national title contending money. The only coaches making significantly more than Belichick are Kirby Smart and Dabo Swinney. $20M is what Ohio State is spending on players this year. UNC isn’t spending this kind of money to go the Duke’s Mayo Bowl again. If they wanted to do that they could save millions and have hired Barry Odom or Jon Sumrall.

I would like to be a fly on the wall when Bill Belichick experiences for the first time:

• A player who doesn’t feel like he is getting enough playing time after four games redshirting and entering the transfer portal in September.
• A player he recruited out of the transfer portal in the winter transferring to another school in the spring.
• Being told one of his players has entered the portal because, using intermediaries that talked to the player through their high school coach, another team has promised him more NIL money.
• Being told how much it will cost just to get a 4 star prospect to come for a visit (not in terms of plane ticket and lodging but in an appearance fee to just show up for a visit).
• Finding out that a player on his team is opting out of a bowl game (though that may be less of a issue going forward than in the past).

The closest comparison to what Belichick is doing is Bill Walsh, who in his 70s coached Stanford. But crucially he returned to Stanford, he had already been a head coach there. His first year went well, going 10-2 and finishing the season ranked 9th. It ended miserably, with seven wins total in the next two years, Walsh said he felt like a passenger rather than a driver; the game had passed him by. He also had health problems, unsurprising for a man in his mid 70s.

College football is rapidly transforming. In his introductory press conference, Belichick said he was going to teach his players the Right Way To Play Football™, and implied that he was tired of getting young players who weren’t taught right by colleges. The only example he gave was “when players leave here, this isn’t going from the wishbone to a pro offense.” The wishbone.

The NFL game might have passed Belichick by, but the college game… At a time when college head coaches are bolting for assistant jobs to get free of the hassle that being a head coach has become, we don’t even know if Belichick ever caught up.

Old Man Yells At Cloud

You how you don’t know how much you miss something until it is gone? Well I haven’t used Twitter in over a year and absolutely did not miss it. Trying Bluesky out now. We’ll see how this goes. Bluesky won’t last because they have no way of ever turning a profit without making it awful, but hey, party while you can.