Former Giants coach Ben McAdoo resurfaced last week for the first time since being fired late in the 2017 season and revealed that he believes the Eagles are “gonna have a hard time handling success” after winning the Super Bowl.
Eagles cornerback Jalen Mills called the feelings of an unemployed coach “irrelevant,” but every championship team has to deal with questions about whether they will have the same urgency that they did when they were chasing the title. Eagles coach Doug Pederson’s response to McAdoo acknowledged that concern as well as his different read on the situation.
“I think there’s a point there,” Pederson said, via NBC Sports Philadelphia. “I mean, quite honestly, complacency can set in. You can skip an OTA, you can maybe skip a workout or whatever. But what I saw from our players was not that. Our players showed up for OTAs, they spent time getting themselves ready. … It is my job to make sure they don’t get complacent and we stay hungry and there is an edge. And we’re going to get everybody’s best each week and that’s what we want. I think anybody that plays on Sunday wants to play the best. So now we’ve got the targets on our backs and we’re going to embrace that and get ready this training camp and we are going to try to defend. But at the same time, we’re going to take it one week at a time and build the season just like we did last year.”
The history of the NFC East does a good job of illustrating how things change from year to year in the NFL. No team has repeated as division champ since the Eagles won four straight from 2001 to 2004. Keeping that streak going will be among the goals of McAdoo’s former employers once the season gets underway.