Eagles? Yeah, Right
There was a drunken Eagles fan sitting a few rows in front of me Sunday afternoon at Gillette. I knew he was drunk because … well, because he was quite obviously drunk. I knew he was an Eagles fan for the same reasons that everyone in section 120 knew he was an Eagles fan: He had his little Eagles cap on and he kept pointing to it as he demonstratively and smugly rooted for the Jets.
Why the Jets? Wouldn’t the Jets have been 6-0 right now if they’d won on Sunday? Sure. But no one out there is holding the Jets up as a better team than the Eagles and no one is about to (except, of course, for Jets fans, who always think their team is the best in the league even though they’re mostly always wrong). Mr. Drunken Eagles Fan wanted the Jets to win, because, at least in his little brain (which wasn’t as well hidden behind his snookered little expression as he might have thought), a Pats loss would have proven that the Eagles are the best team in football, which, apparently, is what Eagles fans think anyhow. At least that’s what one gathers looking at the lede copy on this weeks power rankings at NFLcom and ESPN.com.
Yeah, um, sorry, drunken Eagles fan guy. Sorry, Eagles fans everywhere. The simple fact is that the Patriots remain the NFL’s best team. You can crow about your team all you want, but it’s not gonna change that fact.
The Eagles are undefeated, just like the Pats, yes. And they look like a damned good football team, probably the second best in the league at this point (though don’t go saying anything about that in front of Colts fans — they’re a very, very sensitive bunch), but they’re not the defending champs (in fact, they have a bad habit of choking in the post-season, which keeps them from getting to — forget winning — Super Bowls) and they haven’t won 21 games in a row, which is to say, they’re not the Pats.
Drunken Eagles Fan guy made sure we all knew where he was during both of the Jets’ first-half possessions, particularly during their single scoring drive. At every first down, he stood up, faced the rest of the section and signaled the call like a ref, then pointed to his little cap. When Chad Pennington ran around the left end for a one-yard touchdown just after the two-minute warning, he faced the section once again, arms raised, smug smile polluting his stupid face. I don’t know where he was when the Pats scored at the end of the half. And we never saw him at all during the second half. Maybe he was passed out. Maybe it was just that it had become as clear to him as it was to the rest of us that, close as the game may have appeared on the scoreboard, the Jets weren’t getting out of Foxborough with a win that day. And in the estimation of virtually every football expert in America, the Pats were gonna remain the best team in the league.
Some people might feel bad for a boob like that. But I didn’t.
