Photo: Brian Franey/ESPN

Two days before taking his football team to New Orleans, where the Eagles would demolish the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX, Nick Sirianni walked into an executive conference room on the second floor of the team’s practice facility in South Philadelphia. He was smiling and relaxed.

With three ESPN cameras whirring, four producers, a sound engineer and a team public relations executive hovering, Nick and I started talking about the theme he recited privately to his team, over and over again in the final weeks of this beautiful, but messy, football season: “Embrace adversity.”

SALPAL with Saquon Barkley

“A football season is a grind,” he said. “Nobody has ever pitched a perfect game in football. This is not baseball. You never know what you have to do, where you have to go – we went to Brazil. Started this season in Brazil! Crazy when you think about it.”

Yes, crazy. But also quite true. In the first week of September 2024, the Philadelphia Eagles traveled almost 9,153 miles (roundtrip) to São Paulo, Brazil to play the Green Bay Packers in the first ever NFL game in South America. The field at Corinthians Arena, a converted soccer stadium, was a mess. The crowd was often confused. And Jalen Hurts threw three interceptions.

But a guy named Saquon Barkley, the pyrotechnic running back that General Manager Howie Roseman basically stole from the New York Giants, had a coming out party on a Friday night on the international stage and saved Hurts. And the Eagles won – a pattern that would hold true for most of the season.

After the game, on the field, I did a live interview with Hurts for SportsCenter. He kept it real. “It’s good to get a win,” he said, “when you got this long ass flight home.”

Adversity embraced.

But there was more to come – much more adversity, much of it their own making. 

About a month later, on Sunday night, Sept. 29, 2024, the flight from Tampa back to Philly wasn’t quite as long. But it felt like it. The Eagles just got boat-raced by the Tampa Bay Bucs, 33-16. 

“People were doubting us,” said Sirianni. At 2-2, after the epic collapse of 2023, were the Eagles equipped to do anything special? A poll taken by a Philly sports talk radio station found that 79 percent of the fans wanted Sirianni fired. A guy who had taken the team to the playoffs in each of his first three years.

But the players and coaches had doubts, too. And they decided it was time for action. Members of the offensive line visited Sirianni and begged him to turn the offense over to Saquon Barkley. Vic Fangio, at 66, the oldest defensive coordinator in the NFL, told his players, “Time to go back to basics.” Toughness and tackling. “We talked about getting a body part on the ground – the essence of tackle football,” he said.

Fangio made practices longer. He stressed communication. He inserted rookie defensive back Cooper DeJean.

“What was your reaction to all this?” I asked Sirianni.

“Grateful,” he replied.

“Seriously?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. And the theme of “Embrace Adversity” was born.

The Eagles rattled off 10 straight wins.

Then on December 22, in Landover, Md, in the first quarter of the game against the upstart Washington Commanders, Hurts suffered a concussion. The 36-33 loss to Washington and the loss of their star quarterback for three weeks unleashed a torrent of talking heads who said the Eagles were done. Sirianni and Hurts heard the noise. Channeled it. Used it as a rallying cry. Sweet adversity.

I was embedded with the Eagles at the Super Bowl. In New Orleans, there were two important pivot points that stood out.

On the day after the Eagles arrived, Fangio showed his defensive players a graphic on a big screen: The Eagles were 5-0 on artificial turf, giving up a league low 11 points a game in those five wins. The Superdome had S5 Turf Nation artificial turf which was designed for “high performance.” In other words, speed. And the Eagles defense, the youngest in the NFL, had speed at all three levels. The Superdome was tailor-made for the Eagles D. 

“That fired us up,” said Pro Bowl linebacker Zack Baun.

And the night before Super Bowl LIX, in the final team meeting of the season at the team hotel on the edge of the Mississippi River, one after another, players got up to address the group.

“There was no emotion like the last Super Bowl,” said Joe Pannunzio, a special teams assistant. “It was all dead serious. We got unfinished business. Let’s take care of business.” 

All business, indeed. From the opening kick-off at the Superdome, the Eagles brought the fight – “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Mike Tyson once said.

The Eagles pass rush tormented Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, sacking him six times, forcing him to turn the ball over three times. DeJean started it all with an interception. Mahomes had no time to breathe in the pocket.

Meanwhile, Hurts was on time and on target, even if the Eagles running game – the foundation of their offense all year long – was stuck in neutral.

Up 24-0, Saquon Barkley, who was struggling to get any traction, went back to the Eagles bench and refused to take anything for granted. Pumping his fists, Barkley yelled to his teammates, “Don’t fall for it! Don’t look at the scoreboard. The score is nothin-nothin. Zero to zero. Let’s finish this. Don’t let up.”

And, remarkably, perhaps remembering all the adversity they had to overcome, Jalen Hurts & Company did not let up and finished off the Chiefs, 40-22. The game was not that close.

The 2024 Philadelphia Eagles, the greatest team in franchise history, completed the greatest post-season win in the history of professional sports in Philadelphia, knocking off a team that had won two straight Super Bowls, a team with at least four guys headed for the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, avenging the loss in the Super Bowl two years earlier.

Hurts became the first NFC quarterback in history to lose his Super Bowl debut and come back and win it. Hurts, just like in Super Bowl LVII, led both teams in both passing and rushing yards. This time, he was the MVP of the game.

The next morning, after a night of cigars and champagne and dancing, Sirianni and Hurts faced a worldwide contingent of cameras and reporters with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. They posed with the glittering hardware of victory, the Lombardi Trophy, the sterling silver monolith designed by Tiffany’s.

Sirianni, who lives in South Jersey with his wife and family, was in my opinion the MVP of the season. He held this team together and propelled it forward in times of trouble and triumph. “He always had the right message for the team,” team owner Jeffrey Lurie told me after the game.

Sirianni grabbed the podium and the Lombardi Trophy and said something in a very quiet voice that made the assembled crowd pause and pay attention: “I once told the team, if you put your phone down, and look each other in the eye and make a connection, you have a chance to do something special together.”  

Sal Paolantonio, a national correspondent for ESPN for 30 years, has lived in South Jersey since 1985.