From Lane Johnson’s worth to a fan base’s anger, here’s what we learned about the 2025 Eagles

In the final scene of Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers’ brilliant comedy about government espionage and … divorce, a CIA administrator, played by J.K. Simmons, listens as a subordinate named Palmer lays out a wild sequence of events. To sum it up: Tilda Swinton is married to John Malkovich but has been having an affair with George Clooney, who himself is married but has been dating Frances McDormand, who is friends with both Brad Pitt, who gets shot in the face by Clooney, and Richard Jenkins, who is in love with McDormand but gets hacked to death with an ax by Malkovich, who is left in a coma after getting shot by a CIA agent. At the end of the story, a dumbfounded Simmons finally rolls his eyes and asks, “What did we learn, Palmer?”

I don’t know about you, but that scene makes me think of the 2025 Eagles.

So, what did we learn from this season? Here’s what:

The offensive line has been the key to the Eagles’ success for years. This year, they lost that key.

The debates around Jalen Hurts, Nick Sirianni, Kevin Patullo, and A.J. Brown — and around what Jalen Hurts, Nick Sirianni, Kevin Patullo, and A.J. Brown might have said to one another on the sideline during the Eagles’ loss Sunday night to the San Francisco 49ers — are all, to a large degree, academic. If the team’s offensive line had played at the level that it did in 2024, or anywhere close to that level, the entire scope of the season, let alone Sunday’s result, would have been different. One statistic clarifies how great the falloff was: Last season, Saquon Barkley averaged 3.8 yards before contact. This season, he averaged 1.4, according to TruMedia.

There are obvious explanations for the line’s regression: injuries, general wear and tear, replacing a road-grading guard in Mekhi Becton with a lesser run-blocker in Tyler Steen. Demoting Patullo, as the Eagles did Tuesday, was the predictable and correct move. Still, there’s no getting around the reality that one of the reasons few people complained about Kellen Moore’s play-calling in 2024 is that the 2024 OL could create holes and lanes for Barkley anytime, anywhere. Patullo did not have that luxury, and it’s unlikely the next conductor of the Eagles offense will, either, because …

» READ MORE: The 2025 Eagles played not to lose. In the end, that’s why they did.

… Lane Johnson has been the franchise’s most important player for a long time, and his future is murky. He turns 36 in May. He didn’t play after mid-November because of a Lisfranc sprain in his right foot. He is a surefire Hall of Famer. Since the Eagles drafted him in 2013, their record with him is 110-57-1, and their record without him is 18-27. The end of a great career is approaching, perhaps not next season but certainly sometime soon, and the franchise has to start making plans to replace him or to mitigate the effect of his absence. One way would be to draft some promising offensive linemen. Another would be …

… for the Eagles to set themselves up as a defense-first team. That’s where their best young players are, and there are such players at every tier of the unit: Jalen Carter, Jordan Davis, and Moro Ojomo at tackle; Jalyx Hunt and Jihaad Campbell on the edge; Zack Baun and Nakobe Dean (if they can keep him) at linebacker; Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean in the secondary. Plus, well, Vic Fangio. And the Eagles are going to need that defense to be elite, or as close as possible, because …

» READ MORE: The Eagles’ toughest playoff opponent won’t be the 49ers or Rams or Seahawks. It’ll be themselves.

… the questions about Jalen Hurts aren’t going away. The biggest of them, ahead of the 2025 season, was whether the Eagles could rely on him more than they once did. In ’24, their running game was so dominant that they could get away with throwing the ball less often than any other team in the NFL and still win the Super Bowl. This season — without Barkley ripping off 6 yards every carry, with Hurts himself running less frequently and without the same explosiveness he had in the past — the offense sputtered and stalled. Given that Hurts will turn 28 in August and has absorbed his share of punishment over his five years as the Eagles’ starter, it’s fair to wonder whether that dynamism with his legs is gone forever.

It’s not that the Eagles can’t win a championship with Hurts. Of course they can. They did. It’s that they have to ask themselves, What conditions do we have to create to ensure that Hurts will be at his best, and can we create them? The Eagles and everyone around them have to set their expectations for Hurts and the entire franchise accordingly, for these last five-plus months proved that …

… Philly fans are at their worst when their teams don’t meet expectations. Based on the collective outrage since Sunday’s game, you’d never know that the Eagles won a Super Bowl less than a year ago and haven’t had a losing season in five years.

There seems to be a repulsive sense of entitlement and hair-trigger anger growing within the fan base, symbolized by a Bucks County indoor golf course whose owners allowed customers to drive balls at a projection of Patullo’s face. Patullo already had someone chuck eggs at his house in November, and if that incident could be dismissed as dumb kids doing dumb things, this one had a calculated maliciousness to it, especially considering the way it spread over social media.

You want to be a jerk in the privacy of your own home? Go for it. But a business or anyone else doing something like this for the likes and the attention is lousy, and it has the potential to snowball into something worse. It doesn’t matter how bad a play-caller Patullo was or wasn’t. Cut out the juvenile crap. The Eagles lost. Grow up and get over it.