Eagles announcer Merrill Reese was miserable calling Cowboys blowout

By the time the Eagles were set to receive the kickoff to begin the second half, longtime Eagles radio announcer Merrill Reese had already seen enough.

“The Eagles will be receiving the kickoff to start the third quarter,” Reese said. “I’m not sure that’s good.”

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The Eagles were dominated by the Dallas Cowboys Monday night in a not-ready-for-primetime performance that wasn’t as close as the 41-21 score would indicate. As Jeff McLane wrote, the Birds were “completely outclassed on both sides of the ball,” and came within a few inches of giving up nearly 50 points to their NFC East rival.

Reese has been the voice of the Eagles since 1977, and is the longest-tenured play-by-play announcer in the NFL. Over the past 23 seasons, he’s called games alongside former Eagles wide receiver Mike Quick. In those 44 years, Reese has seen a lot of terrible Eagles performances, but few were as disappointing and one-sided as Monday night’s loss.

“Didn’t something like this happen at Little Big Horn?” Reese asked Quick mockingly.

Over the course of the night, Reese mocked the Eagles’ ineffective line play (“The bigs for the Eagles have come up small”), nonexistent defense (“They have been, in a word, manhandled tonight”), long third-down plays (“Now they’re in 3rd and Galveston”), and abysmal coaching (“the Eagles are clearly overmatched, clearly.”)

“There’s nothing mysterious about what the Cowboys are doing,” Reese said. “It’s just power against power, or lack of power.”

In fact, the only Eagles player Reese really gave any credit to during the game was punter Arryn Siposs.

“So far, the Eagles MVP is the punter,” Reese said drily in the second quarter. “Not a good sign.”

Of course, Reese isn’t alone in chastising the Eagles lackluster performance Monday night. Columnist Mike Sielski called it “malpractice” for Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni to only run the ball twice with Miles Sanders, while beat writer Josh Tolentino wrote that the team’s 13 penalties for 86 yards were “unacceptable” for a coaching staff that “preaches fundamentals as one of its core values.”

By the time Dak Prescott knelt down to seal the game for the Cowboys, Reese had seen more than enough from the listless Eagles.

“That’s going to do it as the seconds disappear, and the Eagles have come up not just short, but miles behind tonight,” Reese said. “Just a terrible, terrible day for the Eagles.”

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Reese wasn’t the only person frustrated with the Eagles performance Monday night. After Eagles defender Derek Barnett committed yet another costly penalty, Sirianni was caught by ESPN’s cameras mouthing the words, “It’s always him.”

“We gotta get that fixed,” Sirianni said of the team’s many penalties during his postgame news conference. “The ones that you don’t like and the ones that are most troublesome are the pre-snap penalties. We gotta take care of that, that’s just us being disciplined and we gotta go back to work and get better at that. It’s obviously unacceptable and we’re all in this together. It starts with me and it’s unacceptable on my part. We’ve got too many penalties.”

Following the game, this quote on the loss by Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts quickly went viral, for obvious reasons.

» READ MORE: Jalen Hurts has one of his worst performances in Eagles’ 41-21 loss in Dallas | Analysis