Culture
The Eagles defense couldn’t stop Mahomes in 2022. In Super Bowl 59 they got their revenge
NEW ORLEANS — There Howie Roseman danced, a cigar between his fingers, surrounded by the team that dismantled a dynasty. Players urged their general manager on. Others showered him with champagne. More stood atop their lockers, hollering over speakers that pulsated lyrics that partly defined their franchise within Future’s “Lil Demon.”
Go platinum, f— a budget.
Jeffrey Lurie, the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, later lauded Roseman in the hallway outside. The NFL is not a place to be risk-averse, Lurie believes. Not if you want to unseat the Kansas City Chiefs. Not if you want to be Super Bowl LIX champions. Not if you want to turn a long-languishing team into a league-wide standard that’s won two Super Bowls in eight seasons when it once had none.
“Aggressive,” Lurie said. An organization must be aggressive. Look through the smoke and the spray in the Superdome locker room. Look at all the reasons the Eagles thrashed the Chiefs 40-22 in one of the most blatant beatdowns in Super Bowl history. Look at Saquon Barkley pouring a giant golden bottle of bubbly down an offensive lineman’s throat.
That image doesn’t exist without a three-year contract that fully guaranteed $26 million to the outlier of a devalued position entering his seventh season. No, Terrell Davis would still own the full-season rushing record he set in 1998, instead of watching Barkley topple it by halftime on Sunday — completing the single greatest season by any running back ever. Barkley wouldn’t be there, shirtless and smiling, a once-ringless wonder for the New York Giants, now an Eagles demigod, watching his teammates pass the Lombardi Trophy around the room.
“She looks prettier in person, I’ll tell you that,” Barkley said.
The trophy eventually reached A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, Landon Dickerson and Jordan Mailata — four key members of a young offensive core whose combined offseason extensions included $155 million guaranteed. Aggressive. An organization must be aggressive. The Eagles ranked third in the NFL in cash spending in 2024, per Over the Cap. Lurie authorized Roseman to set the market instead of chasing it, to retain a foursome that knew what it took to beat the Chiefs because they’d each suffered the last-minute loss in Super Bowl LVII. Mailata had beaten a locker-room refrigerator with his fists that day. On Sunday, he’d beaten a team pursuing the NFL’s first-ever three-peat.
Beaten is too kind a word for what the Eagles did to the Chiefs. They made a two-time reigning champion that only lost two games all season look like losing was all it ever did. They made Patrick Mahomes, a three-time Super Bowl MVP, not only look mortal — they familiarized him with football mortality. They pulverized him within a brutal three-drive sequence that supplied the Eagles with a 24-0 halftime lead — an advantage that eventually swelled to 34-0 after Mahomes, who was sacked a season-high six times, was further throttled in the third quarter.
The Chiefs only trailed 10-0 when Mahomes dropped back on the first play of their fourth possession. Eagles edge rusher Josh Sweat blustered past tight end Travis Kelce so swiftly, Mahomes didn’t have time to dish a checkdown to Kelce before Sweat tore him down with one hand. On the next play, Jalyx Hunt, a third-round rookie, bullied Joe Thuney, a two-time All-Pro guard filling in at left tackle, backward and dragged Mahomes down for yet another sack.
Then came the fatal blow. Cooper DeJean, a nickel safety and defensive rookie of the year finalist, started the subsequent third-and-16 drifting toward the sideline in zone coverage. Mahomes rolled to his right, and, anticipating DeJean to remain there, fired a pass across his body toward the middle of the field. But DeJean jumped the pass, picked it off and housed his first-ever interception for a 38-yard touchdown.
PICK 6 IS HECKUVA BIRTHDAY GIFT 🎁@cdejean23 | #FlyEaglesFly pic.twitter.com/aIO8v7Czls
— Philadelphia Eagles (@Eagles) February 10, 2025
DeJean said he was too excited to think. He didn’t even celebrate. He just caught his breath because he immediately returned to the field. The Chiefs went three-and-out after Milton Williams sacked Mahomes within a four-man rush. The Eagles didn’t need to blitz. Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio never sent one. The seven-time defensive play-caller later said “Mahomes is very, very good when you rush five or six” defenders. Fangio had seen Mahomes too often make teams pay for trying too hard to take him down. So, he constructed a game plan in which the Eagles relied on the strength of their secondary, on the belief there’d be enough time for their defensive front to strike home.
Sweat, a member of the Eagles defense that failed to sack Mahomes two years ago, recorded 2.5 sacks. Williams sacked Mahomes twice and forced a fumble in the fourth quarter.
Hmm… we’ve seen this before 😏 pic.twitter.com/UQa3R6t3hU
— Philadelphia Eagles (@Eagles) February 10, 2025
“The boys up front are some bad motherf——,” DeJean said.
They were “angry,” too, if you ask Lurie. That Super Bowl LVII loss drove the Eagles in their journey back to the mountaintop. “I mean, we lived that every day,” Lurie said. They believed they’d be right back with the same ideas. At first, it seemed they would. But a 10-1 start in 2023 devolved into a 1-6 collapse, and Eagles coach Nick Sirianni fired both of his coordinators — Brian Johnson and Sean Desai — in a staff overhaul aimed to repair dysfunctional systems and maximize a roster that Roseman flipped into one of the best the Eagles have ever fielded.
In one dizzying offseason, the Eagles acquired Barkley, linebacker Zack Baun, safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson and right guard Mekhi Becton in free agency, and spent their first two draft picks on DeJean (No. 40 overall) and cornerback Quinyon Mitchell (No. 22). Baun, who’d never before played inside linebacker, burgeoned into a Defensive Player of the Year finalist. Mitchell and DeJean blossomed into starters in a secondary that went from surrendering the league’s third-most passes of 15-plus yards in 2023, to the fewest in 2024, per TruMedia. On Sunday, Mahomes failed to find anything deep in the first half. Mitchell blanketed speedy wideout Xavier Worthy, forcing Mahomes to settle for checkdowns.
Mahomes eventually got flustered. Just before halftime, dropping back from his own 6, Mahomes failed to spot Baun when firing to Hollywood Brown over the middle of the field. Baun intercepted the pass. Jalen Hurts tossed a 12-yard touchdown to A.J. Brown two plays later. Mahomes’ EPA per dropback at halftime (-1.45) was the lowest ever by a quarterback in a Super Bowl since at least 2000, per TruMedia.
Behind the defensive dominance, Fangio’s hands were on the controls, running the system this Eagles regime prefers. If the franchise had its way, Fangio would’ve been the team’s defensive coordinator in 2023. He’d served as a consultant during the 2022 playoffs, but, before Jonathan Gannon suddenly accepted the Arizona Cardinals’ head-coaching job, Fangio left Philadelphia for a one-year stint as the defensive coordinator for the Miami Dolphins. But the Dunmore, Pa., native returned to the team he admired growing up. “I just called them,” he said. “I said, ‘I’m going to get out of Miami if you’re interested. I’m here.’ It was done many days before it was announced.”
Fangio, 66, stood there in the bowels of the first NFL stadium he ever coached in. After starting as a linebacker coach with the New Orleans Saints, after four decades in professional football, Fangio at last had the Super Bowl championship that had long eluded him. He’d begun Philadelphia’s final week of practices with film from his only other appearance — a loss in Super Bowl XLVII as defensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers. That, too, had been played in New Orleans.
“It’s just a really warm feeling of accomplishment,” Fangio said. “And….”
Fangio flinched. Turned. There was Hurts, smiling. The quarterback had slapped the old-school coach on the behind. The two field generals, who developed a friendship while dueling each other on the practice field, hugged amidst the scrum of reporters.
“…. and satisfaction and all of that,” Fangio finished.
And what about that guy?
“Yeah, I think Jalen’s great,” Fangio said. “Him and I have a good little relationship. Very happy for him.”
Hurts, the Super Bowl MVP, the quarterback who embraced a more conservative role with Barkley in the backfield, the man Sirianni always called “a winner,” combined for 293 yards and three touchdowns in the first championship of his career. He carried a cigar in his hand and moved from teammate to teammate with a grin that seemed reserved for that very moment — and that moment alone. There was Brandon Graham, the edge rusher who perhaps made his final appearance with the Eagles, activated for a surprise appearance after suffering what was thought to be a season-ending triceps injury. Hurts tugged Graham by the shoulder pads, pulling him away from the reporters. The past and the present celebrated in the cigar smoke together.
(Top photo: Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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