The Eagles, Flyers, and Phillies have crushed people’s spirits. Worse, they’ve bored us to death.
It's all doom and gloom around three of the four major sports teams in Philadelphia. At the very least, they could try and entertain us.
Sometimes I feel like I missed my window. As a sportswriter, I mean. Paul Simon has a song called “Born at the Right Time” that he released in 1990, which is fitting, because when it comes to covering pro sports, I struggle to shake the sense that I was born at the wrong time.
It would have been cooler, and perhaps more fulfilling, to have been a sportswriter in that era, the mid-1980s into the mid-1990s, not just because the nature of the job was different, but because the nature of sports was, too.
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Access to the athletes, coaches, and executives was much greater, of course, and traditional media had a wider reach, more influence, and healthier expense accounts. But the games and teams themselves were themselves more colorful, more daring, full of characters and strategic experimentation.
The most popular terms, trends, and names in the NFL included Buddy Ryan and the 46 defense, the Buffalo Bills and the K-Gun, Jerry Glanville and the run and shoot, Brett Favre, Deion Sanders. It wasn’t unusual to see NHL players score between 65 and 80 goals in a season: Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, Teemu Selänne, Alexander Mogilny.
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The ’93 Phillies, bawdy and beer-bellied and built to beat you or beat you up, didn’t have to win the World Series to define baseball in this city for a generation. And in the NBA, you could ricochet from the Bad Boy Detroit Pistons dynasty to the 1990-91 Denver Nuggets, coached by West Philly native Paul Westhead, who quoted Shakespeare on the regular, tried to implement his breakneck “system” at the pro level, and won just 20 games … but goosed the offensive stats of such immortals as Michael Adams, Orlando Woolridge, and Blair Rasmussen.
The point is, it’s possible — and I’d argue it was much more common back then — to lose, or to have a season with a disappointing ending, while still being interesting. Why the reminder? Because the last two weeks might have convinced people around here that following their favorite teams must be the emotional equivalent of having Joe Pesci put your head in a vise and start slowly turning the handle.
It has been rough, all right. The Phillies had every baseball-loving teenager in the Delaware Valley asking ChatGPT about “1964 COLLAPSE” before the Braves knocked them out of the National League wild-card round. The Eagles are an injury-riddled, identity-missing mess, fortunate to be 2-2. And over their first four games, the Flyers have done little more than lie down at center ice with their skates in the air.
Even the most dispassionate observer would have to acknowledge that it has been excruciating just to pay attention to these three teams lately, let alone care about them deeply. But the reasons that they’ve been such a hard watch, that so much anger and angst has been bubbling up, go beyond the Phillies’ dropping their fourth straight playoff series or the Eagles’ squandering a double-digit fourth-quarter lead. It isn’t just that these teams have been losing. It’s that these teams have been boring.
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The 2026 Phillies were exactly the club that everyone (other than John Middleton and Dave Dombrowski, apparently) expected them to be. They had their moments, thanks to their starting pitching and Kyle Schwarber, but those flickers were snuffed out by the team’s atrocious baserunning, lousy situational hitting, and poor defense. All of those flaws were present and visible when the regular season began, and the Phillies corrected none of them. They were on track most of the season to meet every worst expectation, so it was hardly surprising or fascinating when they did.
A similar dynamic is playing out with the Eagles. Sure, the offense had a new coordinator in Sean Mannion, some question marks along the offensive line, and some work to do to make up for the departure of A.J. Brown. It was natural to think Mannion, Jalen Hurts, and everyone else would need time, maybe a few weeks into the regular season, before they got their footing, except they’re wobbling and wiping out like rookie surfers. (Turns out, converting on third down is kind of important for an offense!)
Hurts can’t operate the system from under center. Lane Johnson retired. Cam Jurgens has been traded. DeVonta Smith, Dallas Goedert, Saquon Barkley, and Landon Dickerson are hurt. The result of all this upheaval, inexperience, and incompetence is that Mannion might as well be drawing up plays in the dirt at FDR Park. OK, Darius, you’re the bottle cap. Elijah, you’re the piece of glass. Remember not to cover up the tight end this time.
The Flyers are a different category of bus crash altogether, because they were supposed to be fun. They were supposed to be the young, up-and-coming team hitting its stride. Instead, they’re the perfect example of the distinction between bad and dull. If they were losing 5-4 or 6-5 every night, if Porter Martone and Matvei Michkov were scoring and setting up one goal after another, if the team merely needed to clean up some defensive deficiencies, that would be one thing. It’s another thing, though, to be outscored, 17-5; to be outshot, 158-77 —tied for the league’s second-highest such differential through four games since 1959 — and to be a shallow speed bump for opponents to drive over.
Hopelessness. That’s the prevailing feeling here. The Eagles’ defense might improve enough that they can slog through the rest of the season into the playoffs, dragging the offense along. The Flyers could make a franchise-altering trade or, in theory, straighten things out without one. But at the moment, there’s no sign of either of those happy outcomes on the horizon. There seems to be just the same predictable tedium until Oct. 20, when the 76ers open their regular season. Help us, LeBron. Hey, entertain us, at least.
