Eagles make Christmas green and bright after breaking skid against Giants, but what awaits after New Year?

…Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright

The sun to shine by day and all the stars at night…

The speakers inside the Eagles’ locker room played Christmas carols on Monday night, and there was reason for the team to be cheerful. After three humiliating losses, the Eagles had just won their first game since Thanksgiving weekend with a 33-25 victory over the New York Giants. It made Mele Kalikimaka a fun postgame serenade. 

This was the best they’ve looked in a month, albeit against the worst opponent in the month. But the rotating mix of Christmas music might have played a lyric about “muddle through somehow,” because that’s the way it seemed at the end of the game. They still made game-changing turnovers, head-scratching mistakes, and the victory did not feel secure until the final play against one of the worst teams in the NFL. So no, it was not all merry and bright even though the Eagles’ 11-4 record is tied for best in the NFC.

“It is better than what it was. But we’re still not playing to what we want it to be,” DeVonta Smith said by his locker after the game. “We got two weeks. …We’re going to get it fixed. We got two weeks.”

Jordan Mailata called the win a “huge stepping stone to climbing back to who we want to be,” although it says something that an eight-point win over the Giants is considered a step in the right direction. That shows how far their direction went askew. 

Brandon Graham did not want to hear it. The Eagles’ longest-tenured player — and an unabashed optimist — has little time for qualifying victories. He knows how Christmas night would have felt had the Eagles lost. He knows how long it has seemed since they won. So Graham savored the victory and dismissed any qualifiers. 

“We got to be building, building, and getting hot at the right time,” Graham said. “Like I told Jalen (Hurts), man, I love seeing you smiling out there, because we all feel that. That’s the biggest thing, making sure we’re having fun. We know we have the players. Let’s not make it not fun when we’re winning. Don’t let people on the outside make you feel like, ‘You all barely did this…’ There’s no almost, no barely. Did we win or did we lose?”

Graham is correct in that it’s a zero-sum game. There’s a winner and loser, and any analysis about how they win (or how they lose) will not change the result. But the reason there’s so much scrutiny about the way they played — even from their own locker room, mind you — is the standard this season is not eeking past the Giants. They were two-touchdown favorites. This was the expected result. The way the Eagles played, even in victory, won’t extend the season into February. And that’s the curve on which the season is evaluated.

“Obviously, we have some things to clean up, but good energy to get back on the right side of things,” Sirianni said. “Always better feeling correcting the tape after a win than after a loss that’s for sure. So, we needed to get out of the funk that we were in and sometimes that’s just by getting a win.”

The Eagles looked like last year’s team for much of the first half, when they scored 20 points for the first time before halftime this season. (They did it 10 times last season.) Considering the Eagles failed to reach 20 points in any of the past three games, this was a signal that they were on the verge of a “get-right” game. But there were small miscues late in the half that are unacceptable for a championship-level team. Jalen Carter failed to get off the field in time on a punt, allowing the Giants to extend their drive. Sirianni mismanaged his timeouts at the end of the half and allowed too much time to come off the clock. Hurts did not run out of bounds when he needed. The Eagles were lucky to settle for a field goal before halftime. 

“I make that mistake, then Jalen makes that mistake,” Sirianni said. “We have to be better in that two-minute drive. We’ll learn from that.”

It might seem pedantic to focus on an end-of-half sequence in a blowout — which it appeared to be at the time — except two turnovers in the third quarter brought the Giants right back in the game. Both were unfortunate blunders, with Olamide Zaccheaus bumping into Boston Scott and dislodging the ball on the opening kickoff in the second half and Hurts throwing an interception returned for a touchdown when Dallas Goedert tripped on an intended pass. (Goedert said that play would keep him awake him on Monday night.) But those two plays turned into 15 points for the Giants, and a 20-3 halftime lead was suddenly a 20-18 nailbiter. So the end-of-half sequence was no longer pedantic. And recounting the sequence is not to describe play in which you almost assuredly watch, but rather to outline how a team that’s been plagued by turnovers (-7 in turnover differential this season) and miscues they considered uncharacteristic must break the sobering reality that these plays are characteristic of them this season.

“It’s Week (16) right now. It’s embarrassing to have too many guys on the field. I had a bad snap. …It was a sloppy game overall,” Jason Kelce said. “We played really well at times. …A lot of really, really good things. But the mistakes, gross errors, penalties, kept them in the ball game.”

So what, now what? That’s a phrase Hurts likes to recite. After the interception, that was the message. And Hurts led the Eagles on an eight-play, 75-yard drive that left teammates gawking after the game. The crowd chanted “run the ball” and voiced its displeasure — Hurts said it’s supposed to be loud when the defense is on the field, not the offense — and the Eagles were stuck in third-and-20 at their own 26-yard line.

“There aren’t a lot of plays you can draw up on third-and-20,” Sirianni said.

This is when it helps to have an MVP-caliber quarterback. Hurts bought time, navigated the pocket, and whirled a rope to A.J. Brown for 32 yards to extend the drive. It was the play of the game, the type a quarterback with a nine-figure contract is expected to make. offensive coordinator Brian Johnson adhered to the crowd on three of the next four plays with rushes that finished with D’Andre Swift’s touchdown. Hurts’ conversion helped shift the momentum — and the margin.

“Held up enough and looped it through the pocket, and was able to get it open through the defender,” said Hurts, who finished with 301 passing yards and set an NFL record for rushing touchdowns with 15. “A.J. made a great play, staying alive, not letting the situation get the best of us and finding a way to overcome that circumstance, and kind of put ourselves there.”

The Giants still managed to stay in the game with a 69-yard touchdown pass — the biggest blemish on the defense’s night — but the Eagles were better able to execute a four-minute offense late in the game to come away with points. New York’s last attempt at a touchdown came short with Kelee Ringo’s first career interception. Matt Patricia’s group held the Giants to 4 of 14 on third downs and 4.9 yards per play, which was a sign of progress. Of course, the Giants offense is not a playoff-caliber unit. What mattered more was the positive signs the Eagles offense showed, with their most yards per play of the season (6.3) and tied for their most first downs of the season. They rushed for 170 yards, and had 13 plays that would qualify as explosive plays by Sirianni’s standards. Hurts thought it was fair to consider it a step in the right direction, although simply scoring into the 20s would have qualified after the past three weeks.

The end result brought the Eagles to 11-4, and for whatever agita they create, they also still have a plausible path to the No. 1 seed and a likely path to the NFC East crown. Who would have signed up for that in September?

That’s the push-pull in evaluating this team. They still made critical mistakes. They only won by eight points against a team that Dallas beat by a combined 74 points this season. There is sideline bickering, which can fairly be spun as a sign of competitiveness but could also prompt concerns about a tightly wound team that must improve. And that’s why Smith dismissed a question about reaching 1,000 receiving yards on the season. He has far more to worry about than reaching an individual benchmark, and the quality of their play must match the quality of their record for the team to reach the heights expected.

“I’m not satisfied right now. …We’re not playing good as an offense,” Smith said “I have all the confidence in the world that we can fix it. …But we’re running out of time. We got two weeks. We got two weeks to put it together.”

…Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?…

The Christmas carols kept playing in the locker room, and maybe there was meaning there. The decorations will be removed, the trees will be hauled, and the Eagles still have much to clean. Time is winding down. Only two games remain in the regular season, and there’s no margin for error thereafter. They must clean their mistakes or they’ll be left cleaning their lockers.