We have now officially entered the "team of destiny" mode.
How else do you explain what happened last night at Lincoln Financial Field.
I'll leave that to Eagles head coach Doug Pederson: We're going to the Super Bowl.
Actually Doug added a little spice to his comment: "We're going to the stinkin' Super Bowl."
With Nick Foles as his quarterback.
The underdog Eagles again spit in the eye of the expert and simply dismantled a highly touted Vikings defense, with Foles doing the work of a surgeon in wielding a precise scalpel to carve up the highly touted Vikings defense.
In a way, the fact that the Eagles won is not a surprise. They were playing at home in the NFC title game.
How they did it was a stunner.
After falling behind 7-0, the Eagles - sparked by a Pick-6 interception return by Patrick Robinson - ran off 38 unanswered points.
And it wasn't really that close.
Foles, who took over the team after potential MVP Carson Wentz went down with a knee injury, played out of his mind. Foles went 26 of 33 passes for 352 yards, with three TD passes and no interceptions.
Foles led the Birds into the playoffs, and last night he was every bit the potential MVP of the man he replaced.
How good was Foles? A weird thought came over me in the third quarter. Could Carson Wentz - or for that matter Tom Brady or any other NFL QB - have played any better than Foles?
Much of the credit for this must go to Doug Pederson, perhaps the perfect coach for this team.
If the team has been labeled underdogs since losing Wentz, Pederson has toted that tag around since he was named head coach last year. One expert actually dubbed Pederson the least qualified head coaching candidate in NFL history.
And that was before the Eagles lost their best running back in Darren Sproles.
And their All-Pro starting left tackle Jason Peters.
And special teams ace Chris Maragos.
And starting middle linebacker Jordan Hicks.
And then what was supposed to be the death knell, the one injury the team could not survive. Wentz's knee exploded, putting him on the shelf for the rest of the season.
Enter Nick Foles. He beat the Giants, then struggled for two weeks in brutal cold conditions.
But Foles seemed to turn things around in the second half of last week's divisional round game against the Falcons.
Last night he was simply lights out.
It was a chance to silence the critics for Pederson.
It was redemption for Foles, who once threw 27 TD passes and just 2 interceptions for the Eagles just a few years ago, then returned as an afterthought, a backup to Wentz, an insurance policy the Eagles certainly never thought they would have to use.
Now?
Now he has a date with Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and the Patriots in Super Bowl LII (that's 52 for those of you not up on your Latin). It's a rematch of Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005.
The underdogs are now Top Dogs.
Or, as Doug Pederson might say: The Eagles are going to the stinkin' Super Bowl.
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