Eagles dynasty or downward spiral? Why 2026 is a crossroads season.

It’s not easy to keep a Super Bowl team together.

Prosperity is a marvelous, but difficult thing, to achieve in today’s NFL. Up until the 1990s, it was far easier for franchises to keep a Super Bowl roster intact. There was no salary cap or free agency until the 1990s. The seasons were much shorter in length, at first 14 games, then 16, with fewer rounds of the playoffs. Off-seasons were longer, allowing players who played deep into the postseason more time to recover for the following year.

Now, it

is difficult to keep a Super Bowl roster intact and, even when you can, the length of the season makes it more difficult to repeat a deep playoff run, even if most of the same pieces return from one year to the next.

The 2023 and ‘25 Eagles are perfect examples of this. Following their Super Bowl loss to the Chiefs after the 2022 season, the Birds returned most of their roster the following year. But the loss of key coaches, a shorter off-season and a disastrous in-season defensive coaching change led to a wild card round exit.

Last season, the Eagles suffered the effects of their run to Super Bowl 59. A battered and bruised offensive line that gritted its way to a championship didn’t get enough time to recuperate over the summer. Sapped of the motivation to win a title, A.J. Brown was off all year. The offensive coordinator hired to replace Kellen Moore was a disaster.

The Nick Sirianni era has had a pretty predictable pattern up to this point:

2021 — Wild Card loss
2022 — Super Bowl appearance (loss)
2023 — Wild Card loss
2024 — Super Bowl appearance (win)
2025 — Wild Card loss

If you have children of a certain age, you recognize this pattern from their math homework. You know what you would tell your children to write in as the next answer. Their wild card loss to the 49ers was a bummer, but a longer off-season will allow more time for players to heal from season-long injuries. A newly motivated roster and, hey, maybe a little better luck, too, could certainly allow the Eagles to return to the Super Bowl in 2026.

But it isn’t as simple as the progression of a five-year pattern. We tend to forget just how unstable things were at the start of the 2024 season. After a 2-2 start, fans were calling for the head coach’s job. No one was sure how things were going to go. But they hit their stride after the bye week and put together one of the greatest single-season stretches of football in NFL history.

There is a similar amount of certainty right now, although some questions have been answered. Lane Johnson and Landon Dickerson are both coming back. With a full off-season to rehab their injuries, both players decided to come back for one more season at least. Cam Jurgens and his achy back will hopefully be better than he was a season ago, too. The defense has some personnel issues to work out (Do they re-sign Jaelyn Phillips and, if not, how do they replace him? Who plays CB2? What about safety?) but with Vic Fangio returning for at least one more season, you feel relatively confident that side of the ball is in good hands.

There are far more questions on the offense. Will A.J. Brown be traded? If so, how will they fill out the receiver room? If not, will it be another season of headaches and underperformance? Will Saquon Barkley and O-line function more effectively in a new system? And most importantly, will Jalen Hurts buy into what first-time offensive coordinator Sean Mannion wants to do?

Folks, there are two scenarios we’re looking at here.

The first is that things fall into place in the same way they did two seasons ago when the Eagles went on their kill-crazy blitz. Mannion’s design will be just what the doctor ordered for Hurts, DeVonta Smith, Barkley and the rest of the offense and, led by a hungry young defense, the Birds will go on another deep playoff run. I’m not sure what percentage chance there is of this happening, but it’s not insignificant. This is a team that has been to two of the last four Super Bowls and won one of them. It’s in their DNA and would almost certainly push this era of Eagles football into the “dynasty” category.

The second, of course, is perhaps the one that is more likely. Mannion is coming to Philadelphia with new ideas and a new scheme. He has never called plays before. He has never been an offensive coordinator before. It would be understandable is there are growing pains as Hurts tries to learn a totally new way of running an offense. Or, if there is friction between Hurts and Mannion as the two men try to get on the same page. If Brown is traded away, it could take more than one off-season for Roseman to figure out how to replace his production. The offensive line may not be much healthier than it was a season ago. The defense may simply not be able to carry enough water to make up for another year of offensive futility.

Good teams need to figure out how to stay good. Most franchises go through cycles of success and failure, and the Eagles are no different. Thankfully, the times of struggles have been far shorter than the successes over the last 20 years. Good, young, cheap players eventually become veteran, high priced players. General managers need to continue drafting well in order to supplement the roster with good, cheap talent, much the way Roseman did in the ‘22 Draft. It’s the only way the window stays open.

The Eagles are at another crossroads. The last time they faced an off-season like this, Roseman pushed all the right buttons and the Eagles won a Super Bowl.

Will it happen again?