David Murphy: Forget all the Week 1 questions: The Eagles are still better than the Chiefs

David Murphy, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sep 9, 2025

Published in Football

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PHILADELPHIA — The edge in Week 1 goes to the teams that know how to win. It is as close as the regular season gets to “survive and advance.” Nobody is playing with a full deck. The first game of the season is a chance for a coaching staff to see what it actually has, in actual games, against actual opponents. How it adjusts is how the story is written.

Nick Sirianni is now 5-0 in season openers. That’s a big enough sample to give the guy his due. I’m an early-stage Sirianni supporter. A big reason is his habit of winning games like the one the Eagles won against the Cowboys, 24-20, in Thursday’s NFL opener. You’d need two hands — and maybe more — to count the number of games the Eagles “could have lost” or “should have lost” but didn’t while going 30-12 since the start of the 2022 season. The top line on Sirianni’s resumé is the number of times his teams have come out on the plus side of the score differential in games when they have played their opponent equal or worse.

There are two ways to look at the 1-0 Eagles. I’m not sure which is the correct way. The first is the way we would have looked at them last year if they’d opened the season with the game we just witnessed. That is, we would focus on the flaws.

— The lack of an edge rush on a defense that sacked Dak Prescott zero times and either prompted or justified the signing of veteran defensive end Za’Darius Smith on Friday.

— The lack of a second outside cornerback who looked capable of replacing even a diminished Darius Slay.

— The relative lack of running room for Saquon Barkley, whose 60 yards on 18 carries were a lower total than he had in all but one game last season and were a lower yard-per-carry average than he had in all but two.

— The lack of targets, catches, yards, etc. for A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, who combined to see just four balls thrown their way.

The second way to look at the 1-0 Eagles is the way that most of us are leaning heavily toward right now. All of the flaws that we just listed should only further our belief in how robust a contender they remain. They won in spite of them, which is what the greatest of teams do.

— Even if CeeDee Lamb usually makes those catches, the Eagles aren’t going to face many more CeeDee Lambs this season. Next week against the Chiefs, they’ll face a bunch of Jahan Dotsons.

— Even if the Cowboys managed to bottle up Barkley better than any opponent we’ve seen, the Eagles still managed to move the chains with enough regularity to make you feel that they would be able to move them in any situation when it was needed to win.

— Even if the pass rush wasn’t what you typically see from an elite defense, and even if Adoree’ Jackson was giving his assignments more cushion than the Princess and the Pea, the Eagles still managed to hold the Cowboys to six points on their last six drives. The run defense remains a foundational element: Take away Miles Sanders’ 49-yard run and they held the Cowboys to 70 yards on 21 carries.

The great thing about the Eagles is that they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt. We don’t have much choice about how we view them. It would feel ludicrous to raise any sort of substantive alarm about a team that just beat its biggest rival in a division game on national television in the season opener eight months after it blew out a modern-day dynasty in the Super Bowl. It’s a weird place to be as a Philadelphian.

What I saw on Thursday night was a team that I am reasonably confident remains well ahead of the Chiefs in both talent and moxie. At last check, Kansas City will enter next Sunday’s game as a 1.5-point home favorite. The Chiefs will also enter at 0-1 after losing, 27-21, to the Chargers in a game that unfolded in similar fashion to the one the Eagles won against the Cowboys. The Chiefs did not find a way to win. They also did not look like a substantively different team from the one that the Eagles beat, 40-22, in the Super Bowl. Their offensive line is improved, maybe significantly, but Patrick Mahomes remains limited by the lack of a wide receiver anywhere close to Brown and Smith. We all saw the way the Eagles ran out of gas against the Falcons last season after returning from Brazil. If I were a gambler, I would see a lot of value on the Eagles.

For a team in the Eagles’ position, the first quarter of the schedule is about fine-tuning. You identify the places where you are not bulletproof, and you figure out ways to adjust. In that, Sirianni has proved himself better than most coaches in the NFL. The questions from the opener are valid. I wouldn’t be surprised if, come next Monday, they feel a lot less urgent.