Losing the Super Bowl is so strange, because the only objective measure of improvement would be to win it this season. But that feels sort of like an unfair expectation. The team should theoretically be better though, so maybe that is the expectation?
When you win the Super Bowl you don’t really care about improving. We could have gone 0-16 after we won in 17/18 and I wouldn’t really have cared (I still would have been disappointed, but you get the point).
Everyone expects this team to make the playoffs, but will the season be a disappointment if we lose in the WC/Divisional round? How about the Championship?
It just feels so pessimistic to think anything less than winning the Super Bowl is a disappointment.
Football games always have the “any given sunday” element that makes it difficult to judge playoff performance as binary. In the end, you either win or you lose. Should they lose, the next questions you have to ask are, did you play to the best of your abilities, and why did you lose? Other sports have a series for their playoffs, and it’s much easier to definitively say the better team moved on to the next round.
Last year saw some exceptional individual performances, and some disappointments. Gannon can carry a metric fuckton of blame for checking out before the Superbowl, and there were some other individuals underperformed, but overall last year the Eagles played very well and gave it their best shot. We could talk about questionable calls and field conditions, but both teams played on the same shitty field with the same shitty refs.
So this season, if we shit the bed in the playoffs, it doesn’t matter if it’s in the WC or the SB, it’s going to be disappointing. Maybe we play very poorly and don’t make the playoffs. Or maybe we play very well and have a string of bad luck. That can happen, too, and it would be disappointing as fans, but we take solace in knowing the players and coaches did everything they could to win. Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the other thing happens.