If you’re a relatively new Eagles fan, you don’t remember what it used to be like around here. Do you remember the 1960s and 1970s? The Eagles won the NFL Championship in 1960 but then had one winning season from 1962 through 1977. Imagine that? Over a 16-year period, they were the worst team in football, averaging 4 ½ wins per year. You think losing three straight games is bad? Try averaging 4 ½ wins over a decade and a half. Do you remember the 1980s and 1990s? The Eagles reached the Super Bowl in 1980 but then didn’t win another playoff game for 12 years and won just two wild-card games over the next 20 years, getting blown out by the Cowboys at Texas Stadium both times.  You think scrambling to win the division like this year is bad? Try winning five playoff games in a 39-year span.  If you were 17 when the Eagles won the 1960 NFL Championship Game, you were 74 when they won their next championship. If you were 17 when the Eagles lost Super Bowl XV to the Raiders in New Orleans, you were 41 when they reached their next one, losing to the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville. Do you remember that stretch from the late 2000s until the late 2010s? It wasn’t that long ago, but from 2009 through 2016 the Eagles went eight years without a playoff win, cycling from Andy Reid to Chip Kelly to Doug Pederson and enduring three losing seasons in a five-year span. The way we define success has changed a lot. For much of Eagles history, just having a winning record was considered a major accomplishment. It didn’t happen that much. Just 14 times in the franchise’s first 45 years. Just five times from 1962 through 1987.  And winning playoff games? Those were rare occasions for long stretches around here. After the 1960 Championship through the merger and the inception of the wild-card round and then the playoff expansion, the Eagles won a postseason game after only four of 39 seasons. So about once a decade. There was a very good five-year span from 2000 through 2004 under Big Red and then the 2008 NFC Championship Game run and 2017 Championship. But after 2008, the Eagles didn’t win a playoff game for nine years, and after 2017 things went gradually downhill until Pederson was fired after 2020. All of which is a long-winded way of getting to the point.  Which is that the last five years have been the best five years for this football team since the late 1940s, when they reached three championship games in a row and won two of them, both by shutout. And five years is exactly how long Nick Sirianni has been here. Sirianni does some weird stuff. He says goofy stuff. He makes goofy faces and is disliked in every NFL city other than Philly and sometimes including Philly. But look where we are now.   With the win over the Commanders Saturday, the Eagles clinched a playoff berth for a fifth straight year. The only other teams that even have a chance to make it five straight playoff seasons are the Bills and Bucs and neither has even reached a Super Bowl in that five-year period. The Eagles have reached two, won one. Sirianni is only the fifth coach in NFL history to take his first five teams to the postseason. The first four were Hall of Famers Paul Brown and Bill Cowher plus Chuck Knox and John Harbaugh – who coached here from 1998 through 2007.   Of that group, Knox never reached a Super Bowl, Cowher reached one in his fourth season but didn’t win one until his 14th. Harbaugh won one his second year but hasn’t reached a second. And Brown won titles in each of his first five years, although the first four were in the AAFC. So Sirianni stands alone. He’s the only coach in history to reach the playoffs in each of his first five seasons and reach two Super Bowls along the way, winning at least one. So it’s OK to be angry when the Eagles blow a 21-point lead in Dallas, and it’s understandable to be disappointed when they allow 281 rushing yards at home against the Bears, and it’s totally fine to be bummed when they blow chance after chance and lose in overtime to the Chargers. But as the Eagles get ready for another playoff game, just keep it all in perspective. You’re around for one of the most successful stretches in the history of a franchise that’s been playing football for almost a century. The standards are astronomical here. It’s not like this in many places. Probably just Kansas City. Anything short of a Super Bowl is a disappointment. That’s a rare place to be, and it’s a heck of a fun place to be. ...read more read less