Eagles, Eagles fans have two different Sunday nights
It was going to be a rough night for Eagles fans, as established early with the decision to go ahead with the banner in the end zone without any dress rehearsal.
No matter! A game on the national stage against a division rival! A week's worth of insults exchanged between the teams! Black uniforms! What could possibly go wrong?!
As far as the game went, close to nothing. Eli Manning was routinely decimated by the Eagles' defense and LeSean McCoy finished the first half cleaning Giants out of his cleats. A 27-0 win was a far more dramatic statement than anybody considered the Eagles would make, except maybe the Eagles, who posted this video as part of the week's hostile exchanges between the teams.
Week 6: #BlackSunday from Philadelphia Eagles on Vimeo.
The New York Daily News took the time to publish this post in response, in which they compared the cartoon of Eli Manning as a little boy being haunted by ghostly Eagles defenders to the Ray Rice incident. This was after they turned their displeasure with Bradley Cooper's Black Sunday hype video into a cover story.
Regardless of the game's outcome, the NYDN made it clear on this night that they would need little more than a single negative narrative thread to generate an Eagles fan-bashing cover story the following day.
Making their job easy was none other than 97.5 The Fanatic sports radio idiot Mike Missanelli, who tweeted what seemed to be a celebration of Victor Cruz's season-ending injury.
Missanelli fired off a few excuses afterward which may have even been true, but for a guy who was already suspended for being a homophobe and has a history of general pervy-ness, it was just the latest awful thing he's done for which there will be no real consequences.
The NYDN ran with it, slapped it on their cover, and threw in an image of an Eagles employee celebrating with Cruz's crumpled figure lying in the foreground (clearly cheering the missed catch, not the injury - as he explained on 94 WIP). Somehow, the Eagles taking a knee as Cruz was carted off the field didn't make it into the story.
But elsewhere in the parking lot, Eagles fans were taking another hit as a young woman inexplicably stole the prosthetic leg of a Sports Complex mainstay, Sonny Forriest, Jr., out of his motorized wheelchair.
A picture surfaced of a woman in Eagles gear - as the thief was described as wearing - partying with a prosthetic leg, thanks to some casual sleuthing by @FanSince09, who was in New York for his interview on The View.
The leg was eventually discovered at the north end of the Broad Street line in Fern Rock station and returned to Forriest, Jr.
Any sports fan in Philadelphia who doesn't flat out ignore Mike Missanelli knows that his thoughts are merely a stream of knee-jerk ignorance, and the NYDN is likely aware that one guy can't be realistically represent an entire fanbase. The "bad Philly fan" will forever be a national media trope, no matter how the central figures of Philly's most notorious "bad fan moments" actually feel, and there's nothing you can do about it.
So the NYDN published the story anyway, because what a story (and on the plus side, Missanelli, as always, deserves to be shamed), with the icing on the shame-cake being an idiot stealing a guy's leg.
It wasn't a good look, but good looks don't get clicks.