Eagles

Ten years passed between the Eagles' first taste of the biggest stage and their second, and it took Nick Foles, not the injured Carson Wentz, to end the wait: in Super Bowl LII he outplayed Tom Brady's Patriots 41–33 and was named the game's MVP. Jalen Hurts settled any argument about who owned the next chapter when Philadelphia beat the Kansas City Chiefs 40–22 in Super Bowl LIX, taking the MVP award himself. Before either trophy existed, the franchise had already won three NFL Championships in the days before the Super Bowl era, the last of them a 17–13 defeat of the Green Bay Packers in 1960.

None of that was inevitable for a club Bert Bell and Lud Wray assembled in 1933 for $2,500, buying up the rights to the defunct Frankford Yellow Jackets. The name came from Franklin D. Roosevelt's National Recovery Act, whose blue eagle emblem Bell and Wray borrowed rather than invented. Philadelphia still answers to "The Birds," a nickname loud enough to have its own podcast and its own rallying cry around Lincoln Financial Field.

Reggie White's name still carries weight in a defensive lineage that also produced Chuck Bednarik and Brian Dawkins, but it is Jason Kelce's retirement that closed out an era built around Hurts, A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith. Six NFC Championship banners hang alongside the Super Bowl ones, the most recent won in 2024 against Washington, and each one still gets measured against Dallas: the Cowboys rivalry turned openly hostile during the "Bounty Bowl" games of 1989 and has not cooled much since.

With Hurts under center and the Cowboys still the team to beat in the NFC East, Philadelphia goes into the season chasing a third Lombardi Trophy rather than settling for the two it already has.