A two-point controversy, poor coaching, and worse kicking mar an Eagles win. Are we that spoiled?

LANDOVER, Md. — It seems ungrateful to complain about any win, particularly a win that ensures a fifth consecutive trip to the playoffs, and the team in question won the latest Super Bowl.

It seems doubly thankless to whine about the coach and staff that largely have been responsible for this windfall of January football, delivered with an NFC East title earned Saturday with a 29-18 win over the Commanders.

So yes, it seems ungrateful, and even thankless, to wish for better.

But we are Philadelphia, aren’t we?

“We’ve raised the expectations of what to expect,” Nick Sirianni said.

He gets it.

Sirianni shepherded his Eagles into Northwest Stadium to face a 4-10 Commanders team that played without its starting quarterback for the first two-thirds of the game, then played without its backup the rest of the way.

Sirianni’s offensive line was overwhelmed for the first three quarters. His quarterback, Jalen Hurts, was confused most of the evening, typical of Hurts’ meetings with Commanders coach Dan Quinn, the former defensive coordinator for Dallas.

Sirianni’s curious decision to try a two-point conversion instead of kicking a PAT with a 27-10 lead with 4 minutes, 46 seconds to play was the cherry on top. Sirianni said it was simple math, but his postgame handshake with Quinn was very brief. So they got the 19-point lead, but at what cost? A scrum broke out as the scoreboard turned to 29-10. The scrum immediately followed the successful conversion, and it led to the ejection of two Commanders and one Eagle, right guard Tyler Steen. All could face suspensions.

The scrum was precipitated, at least in part, by what some Commanders perceived as Sirianni running up the score against a hapless team using its third-string quarterback. Commanders linebacker Bobby Wagner certainly seemed to be expressing those sentiments to Hurts as the fighting subsided.

Asked afterward what he thought of the two-point try, Wagner replied tersely, “I didn’t understand it.”

Was it a diss?

“Was it disrespectful? Maybe,” Wagner said. “We’ve got to stop them. We’ll see them in a couple of weeks.”

Quinn was less gracious.

“Hey, man, that’s how they want to get down? All good,” he said. “We play them again in two weeks.”

So yes, the hosts were not happy with Sirianni, and that animosity will linger when the Commanders visit Philadelphia for the season finale in two weeks.

The fight (loosely defined; there was no damage done) was the oddest incident of the Saturday, 5 p.m. start, which was itself an oddity. Maybe the unconventionality of the game produced the overarching atmosphere of weirdness.

There was more strangeness in a first half that ended with the Eagles in a 10-7 hole.

Jake Elliott missed field goal tries of 43, 57, and 52 yards, all wide left, the last two almost consecutively. (The 57-yarder was wiped by an offsides penalty and didn’t officially count as a miss, but still mattered.)

Hurts missed A.J. Brown with an easy third-down pass.

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Will Shipley fumbled the opening kickoff, which gifted the Commanders three points. He then brought another out of the end zone; kneeling would have given them the ball at the 35, but it wound up costing the Eagles 16 yards.

Near the end of the half the Eagles had to call a timeout ... coming out of a timeout.

This is not the stuff of champions.

Well, maybe NFC East champions, but the NFC East stinks this season, and besides, the NFC East championship is not the goal, is it? Super Bowl LX is the goal, and it seemed unrealistic after Saturday.

There were just too many glaring mistakes and omissions.

Chief among them: Tight end Dallas Goedert, who had 14 catches for 148 yards two touchdowns the previous two weeks, was not even targeted until the second half.

When the Eagles finally deigned to include the best postseason pass-catcher in their history, it worked out. He caught passes of 8 yards, then 9 yards, drew a penalty on third-and-8 (unaccepted due to a more penal, simultaneous penalty), and then, on third-and-goal from the 15 thanks to offensive line penalties, caught a 15-yard TD pass that gave the Eagles a 14-10 lead.

The TD pass gave Goedert 10 this season after catching a total of eight the previous three seasons combined.

This is the guy who hadn’t been targeted.

Commanders quarterback Marcus Mariota left the game with a hand injury after the first series of the second half, which left the Commanders with Josh Johnson and no backup. They might better have gone with the no backup.

Johnson threw an interception on his first series, a floater across the field to Cooper DeJean at the Commanders’ 37-yard line. The Birds turned it into a touchdown, but it took them seven plays, the last two of which were Saquon Barkley runs of 8 and 12 yards — tough, punishing, bell-cow runs behind a line that finally asserted itself properly.

Barkley finished with 132 yards on 21 runs, his second-best game of the season, and left him at 1,072 for the year, the fifth 1,000-yard season of his eight-year career.

Tank Bigsby added a late TD, which led to the two-point scrum, which minimized the late Commanders’ TD, with 1:10 to play.

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But how to consider the win?

Glass half full: A good win — on the road, against a division opponent, with no offensive turnovers, but with a defensive turnover. Also, a win having lost linebacker Nakobe Dean, who left early with a hamstring injury. Also, a win with right tackle Lane Johnson and defensive tackle Jalen Carter likely to return for next Sunday’s game at Buffalo.

Glass half empty: Another ugly win — against a poor team, a win despite a skittish $5 million kicker who has missed six of his last 11 kicks; a win in which Hurts continued an inconsistent season; a win in which the coaching staff seemed unprepared with a game plan that seemed uninspired.

A win is a win is a win, but, really, is it too much to expect a greater degree of consistency and professionalism from the reigning Super Bowl champions?

Is it ungrateful to believe a 10-5 team should look more like a 10-win team than five-loss team?

Maybe.

But, hey, we are Philadelphia.