Philadelphia Eagles: NFL Champions

Super Bowl 50 takes place this weekend and once again my Philadelphia Eagles won’t be winning this one. I am an Eagles fan, I am very salty, and the empty trophy case jokes are still terribly unoriginal. The Philadelphia Eagles have three NFL Championships that count just as much as a Super Bowl and I’ll stand by that, mostly because it makes fans of other teams mad for some reason. But this brings me to my point: Why is the NFL Championship, the name of the championship game prior to the introduction of the Super Bowl, considered irrelevant compared to the Super Bowl?

Kill me.

Consider the following:

The year is 1965 and the Green Bay Packers have just won the NFL Championship with future Hall of Famers Bart Starr and Coach Vince Lombardi. The Packers go 10-3-1 and beat Jim Brown’s Cleveland Browns 23-12 for their ninth NFL Championship.

The mythical NFL Champion "Green Bay Packers" in 1965

Now, let’s fast forward one year.

The year is 1966 and the Green Bay Packers have just won the NFL Championship with future Hall of Famers Bart Starr and Coach Vince Lombardi. The Packers go 12-2 and beat Len Dawson’s Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 for their tenth NFL Cha--wait, no. Sorry, I mean for their first Super Bowl. Sorry Packers, you can’t call yourself back to back champions, didn’t you hear they changed the name? Yes, we know you have virtually the same team and nothing’s different about the game itself, but that’s just the way it’s going to be.

This one's real!

The Philadelphia Eagles won their last professional football championship in 1960 and yes, it’s horribly embarrassing, but let’s just reminisce over their roster for a moment. Norm Van Brocklin. Sonny Jurgensen. Tommy McDonald. Chuck Bednarik.

Most football fans, and probably all Eagles fans, have heard the names of these four Hall of Famers before, but why? You know, since they played in an era in NFL history that doesn’t matter at all. Like their championships, I think it’s only fair that we just completely disregard their existence entirely.

How absurd does that sound?

Pictured: Chuck Bednarik (left), Norm Van Brocklin (middle), and Sonny Jurgensen (right)

If we changed the name of the Super Bowl today, would we completely disregard the last 49 winners because it’s not the same name? Would the greatest duo of all-time, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, be forgotten in 30 years because the titles they won were named something different? Would this weekend’s game be more important than any other game in NFL history? 

Are we still not seeing how insane this sounds?

I don’t want to hear anyone say, “Well there were only 14 teams back then why would we count something like that?!” If that’s your argument, then why on Earth do we count the first five Super Bowls? They had the same amount of teams but we count them because of the name of the trophy.

The Yankees won 20(!) World Series titles before the Super Bowl was created, but no one bats an eye when those are counted for merit. There were only 16 teams in 1923, the year of the Yankees’ first World Series title, and 18 in 1961 when the Yankees won their 20th and last championship prior to the birth of the NFL’s Super Bowl. Today, we have 30 teams, so why don’t we hear that argument in baseball? What if we ignored what players like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, and Mickey Mantle did for baseball, just because they were born too early? But we don’t. It’s only right that we say the Yankees only have seven World Series, since the first twenty were just so long ago. 

Only 7 of these are real, imo.

Of course we aren’t going to do that. 

Because baseball never changed the name of it’s prestigious award for the best team in baseball.

Obviously, football has changed drastically. It’s also going to change again in the next 50 years. That’s how life works.

I just hope one day in the future the Super Bowl does change its name. And I’m praying that after that name change, the Eagles will win multiple of whatever they decide to call it, while the Cowboys are that era of football’s Cleveland Browns. If those Cowboys fans in the 2070’s decide to gloat about their five Super Bowls (and yes, five. They aren’t winning another one anytime soon), us Eagles fans can laugh at them, and talk about how they need to wipe the dust off their trophy case, and say the year “1995” over and over again like they say “1960” now.

Sorry, I’m living out all my Eagles-related fantasies in this article but it’s just so much fun.

I guess what I’m failing to see is what makes it so different. We’re disregarding the accomplishments of the players who helped professional football become the powerhouse it has become, just because they were too early to the party.

Without them, we might not be having Super Bowl parties on the first sunday of every February.

Without them, Super Bowl XLIX wouldn’t have been watched by 114.4 million people.

Without them, I wouldn’t have to write this sarcastic article as a way of expressing how truly depressing life as an Eagles fan has been.

Me rn.