August 17, 2026

The Eagles don't care about the preseason, and they've been right not to

As far as genuine preparation for the season goes, Eagles coach Nick Sirianni has looked elsewhere for that, and has been justified in doing so.

By Nick Tricome
PhillyVoice Staff

Tanner-Mckee-Sacked-Eagles-Ravens-Preseason-2026-Week-1-NFL.JPG

Jamie Sabau/IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

The Eagles could barely move the ball in Saturday night's preseason opener.

The Eagles played a preseason game Saturday night in Baltimore.

Finally, there was football to watch again. And then their band of reserves reminded everyone who tuned in quickly that Eagles preseason football is a slog anymore.

The starters, they stayed on the sidelines trying to bide their time through the next two and a half hours, while the second- and third-stringers ran a vanilla offense that could barely move the football until developmental QB Cole Payton improvised a scoring drive late.

But by then, what did it really matter?

The Eagles lost the exhibition to the Ravens, 24-7, which was a result that the team almost assuredly discarded from memory immediately.

They'll play the Patriots in New England this Saturday night for preseason game No. 2, but they also have joint practices scheduled up there in the days leading up, which at this point, means way more to them because the starters can get quality reps in a far more tightly controlled environment.

Whereas in the preseason games themselves, the risk of injury – season-altering ones even – has become far too great for gains that offer far too little anymore to be worth it.

Head coach Nick Sirianni recognized this a while ago, pretty much from the second Jalen Hurts got hit while already out of bounds against the Jets four years ago. Most of the Eagles' projected starters for a given year haven't been anywhere near the field during a preseason game since. They don't even dress.

The Eagles just don't value the preseason, or rather, they don't value those three scheduled games at the end of every summer as genuine preparation for the upcoming season, and haven't for a long time. They're a chore if anything, which makes watching them a chore, too.

But given their track record and success under Sirianni, ever since he was hired ahead of the 2021 season, the Eagles have been proven right not to.

Here's a look at the Eagles' preseason records over the past several years, along with their Week 1 and overall results for that given year:

Year	Record	Wk 1 Result	Season Result
2021	0-2-1	@ATL, W 32-6	9-8, Lost WC
2022	1-2-0	@DET, W 38-35	14-3, Lost SB
2023	0-2-1	@NE, W 25-20	11-6, Lost WC
2024	2-1-0	GB, W 34-29	14-3, Won SB
2025	2-1-0	DAL, W 24-20	11-6, Lost WC
2026*	0-1-0	WSH, TBD	TBD
Totals	5-9-2	5-0	59-26

*In Progress

Since 2021, the Eagles have always opened with a Week 1 win and have always made the playoffs at minimum.

Of course, there are some clear frustration points in there. The first chunk of the 2021 season was aggravating, and so were the 2023 and 2025 seasons down the stretch, when injuries after long playoff runs the year before caught up and ineffective playcalling from coaching personnel brain drains for those years dug them into holes too deep to climb out of.

But also not amplified by the table above is the point that the Eagles have been able to field mostly everyone on their first-team out of the gate, since they've kept an extra heavy priority on health and longevity during training camps and their ensuing preseasons, hence why the starters don't play in the preseason anymore.

Is it a perfect science? Of course not, and you only have to look as far back to Cam Jurgens and Landon Dickerson just last season, who each played but were clearly never healthy at any stop. You can argue, too, that the bulk of those Week 1 wins were bumpier than they needed to be, and that a lack of preseason reps for the starters could've been to blame for that.

But it overall has kept the Eagles' floor consistently high relative to the NFL's 31 other teams, and the ceiling and expectations even higher.

So their approach to preseason games, in not really putting much stock in it as genuine preparation, has been proven right, and indirectly, maybe even more so when you look elsewhere to see Jaxson Dart getting crushed and sent to the blue medical tent before he can even do anything that resembles false hope that the Giants will actually do anything meaningful.