The Eagles are taking steps ahead of a hot day in Tampa, but their current flaws threaten to make them moot

The lasting image from the aftermath of last season’s Eagles loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on a sweltering late-September Sunday was the normally noisy C.J. Gardner-Johnson soaking in a cold tub in the bowels of Raymond James Stadium, an IV sending fluids into his body.

The Eagles, playing without Lane Johnson, A.J. Brown, and DeVonta Smith, were blown out by the Bucs in a loss that caused a course correction that sent the Eagles on a new path and led to a Super Bowl title.

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Raymond James Stadium has been the Eagles’ house of horrors. Their 2023 collapse ended there. Their most recent lopsided loss was there. It’s the last place Jalen Hurts lost a game he started and finished. And in a cruel aligning of the stars, it’s where the NFL schedulers are sending the Eagles back to for a Week 4 showdown (1 p.m., Fox29).

The weather forecast responded in kind. Fall has barely arrived here in the Philadelphia area, so it certainly hasn’t yet on Florida’s Gulf Coast. According to AccuWeather, the high on Sunday in Tampa, Fla., will be 91 degrees, and the “Real Feel” will tick above 100.

“Nothing is going to prepare you for that field heat,” Eagles center Cam Jurgens said.

The Eagles are trying. They study a lot of things in the offseason, and one of the things they landed on in the science of playing in the heat was flying out a day earlier. They normally fly to a road city on Saturday, but they’re leaving Friday evening this week after practice. Then they’ll go through their walk-through Saturday and try to get acclimated to the conditions.

“Everything we do is to try to give ourselves the best chance, that our process is right to give ourselves the best chance to win,” Nick Sirianni said Wednesday. “If your process is off, then you don’t have as much of a chance. That was part of our process when we studied some things in the offseason with the heat. Get out there a day earlier to acclimate, one [more] day off the plane before you play a game.”

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It’s unclear what advantage the Eagles stand to gain by flying earlier beyond the added time between deplaning and kickoff, but what’s clear is that sports science and the team’s old-school defensive coordinator aren’t two peas in a pod.

“It is too late to do anything right now for it as far as prepping for it,” Vic Fangio said Tuesday. “You don’t practice in heat one day and say you’re acclimated or take a pill and say you’re acclimated. The key will be it’s a mindset, number one. Number two, we need to not let them have eight-, 10-, 12-play drives on us.”

Fangio doesn’t jibe with the modern NFL practice schedule, and the Eagles didn’t go through training camp baking in the summer sun. It was a relatively mild end to the summer, and while there were a few hot days — on one of them, Fangio used the phrase “heat is a mindset” and wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt — the Eagles haven’t dealt with the heat in a major way since their trip to Tampa last year. They got lucky in Week 2 when clouds rolled in and shielded the sun in Kansas City.

The second part of Fangio’s answer also is cause for concern and threatens to make moot all of the preparation.

The Rams gashed the Eagles on the ground, especially in the first half, continuing a troubling trend for the Eagles defense, which is 24th in the NFL in rushing yards allowed per game (133.3). That number is devoid of some context, since Patrick Mahomes was effective on the ground in scramble situations. But Bucs quarterback Baker Mayfield has been dangerous as a scrambler so far in 2025, so the Eagles will need to be cognizant of that. The Bucs are seventh in the NFL with 130.7 rushing yards per game, and the Eagles are down Nolan Smith, who has at times been impactful off the edge against the run.

On the other side of the ball, running room for Saquon Barkley has been hard to come by, and the Eagles often have allowed too much pressure on Hurts when they’re passing. Johnson’s status will be a big deal. He returned to the practice field Wednesday after being knocked from Sunday’s game in the first quarter with what he called a stinger, but he was taking simulated reps during the portion of practice open to reporters.

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The recipe for a repeat would be the Eagles struggling to run the ball and Hurts facing pressure from a team that deploys blitz packages at some of the highest rates in the NFL and dials them up even more when facing the Eagles.

Bucs coach Todd Bowles told reporters Wednesday that he wasn’t sure his team had an advantage by being the team used to playing in the heat, but said, similar to the cold, playing in the heat makes a team mentally stronger. “Whoever holds the ball longer, the other team is probably going to struggle,” he said.

Maybe this is all irrelevant. Brown, who hasn’t played in each of the last two games in Tampa, wasn’t convinced getting to Florida earlier was going to make much of a difference, the same way he wasn’t convinced the game will be impacted by the conditions.

“Sometimes it’s hot, sometimes it’s cold, but at the end of the day, it’s football,” he said.