A.J. Brown leads the list of new faces in Philadelphia this season but have the Eagles done enough to make them legitimate contenders?

Video Transcript

VOCH LOMBARDI: What's up, y'all? This is Voch. Lombardi. Watch every second of the NFL season when and where you want it only on DAZN.

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Something else that's been bothering me is this idea that the Philadelphia Eagles are a Super Bowl contender now, that they're clearly the best team in the NFC East. And I just want to know where all this progress came from, where all this improvement came from.

Now, I am a Cowboys fan. And I just think that some of the national media-- I think, fans-- they just want to find any reason to hate on my beloved Cowboys, and that they need someone to come in and be the perfect enemy to my Cowboys, so they build up the Eagles. And this happened before in the Dream Team era.

Remember that one time when Vince Young and Mike Vick were the quarterbacks for the Eagles and they went and made all these signings and Nnamdi Asomugha showed up and the team ended up being trashed because they didn't have continuity. That may be what's going on here.

And I have this other theory-- that whoever wins the Super Bowl, they get to dictate how a winning football team is made. So if a team that won the Super Bowl and all they did was draft and they had a bad quarterback and a good head coach, then that's the formula. You got to draft, you got to have a bad quarterback, you got to have a good head coach. That's how you win.

With the LA Rams winning the Super Bowl, then now the new win the Super Bowl formula is, hey, you got to go all in. You got to go and sign free agents and you have to make that final push. You got to get super aggressive in the off season.

Well, the Eagles are taking cues from the Rams. But I think, in this culture that we have, this microwave-y super exciting new headline coach is that any move that anybody makes we tend to overrate it a little bit. So players that I do like that the Eagles have brought in over the off season is Haason Reddick. I did a film session on him. Y'all, go look him up. He's a former Carolina Panther. He's going to bring some value to the edge rush. So he's going to be a rotational edge rush guy.

The Eagles got some ends. I'll give that to them. In the NFL draft, they took two of my favorite Georgia players, Nakobe Dean and Jordan Davis, linebacker and defensive tackle. And I'm a fan of both of those players and I like what they do. How much value are they going to have in their rookie season, I'm not really sure. But I know that they are good players.

And shouts out to Kyzir White. He's another good player.

And the biggest off season acquisition is of wide receiver AJ Brown. And I think that's pretty interesting. The Eagles fans have gone crazy over that acquisition. I tend to look at this from a Cowboys lens. So the Cowboys played the Eagles twice last year. And in the first game, the Cowboys won a whopping 41 to 21. They shouldn't have even had those 21 points. And in the game at the end of the season, the Cowboys smoked the Eagles again, 51 to 26.

Now online, if you ask Eagles fans about that 51-26 butt whooping, they'll say, but, Voch, the only reason that the Cowboys won that game the way they did is because we were playing our backups. Cool. If we play your starters, we beat you by 20. If we beat you by 30-some-odd points while you're playing backups, then we beat you as efficiently as we did the first group. That just makes it a little bit of sense, right?

The Eagles refuse to take accountability for these two Cowboy blowouts. But my problem is, do these improvements cover the blowout that the Eagles have been blown out, right? Now, you can look at these players and go, OK, well, the Eagles probably got 10 points better all together. But if you're getting smoked by 20 and 35 points, I don't think that makes up for the difference.

You know, I like Haason Reddick. I like Jordan Davis. But he's going to be in this mix of D tackles that are already there. So how much change have you really made?

Shouts out to AJ Brown. I do like him as a player. I take a look at his stats over his career-- in 2000-- let's see, let's see, here we go-- in 2019, AJ Brown, 52 for a 1,051 yards. 2020, 70 catches, for 1,075 yards. 2021, 63 catches for 869 yards. You would think that the second coming of Calvin Johnson was coming to save the Philadelphia Eagles.

But this is my problem with this-- AJ Brown ain't that dude. And look-- I love when Eagles fans try to make it make sense. They go, but, Voch, the only reason that AJ Brown didn't get those numbers in Tennessee is because they're a run-first team and they don't have a good quarterback. What you think AJ Brown is doing with the Eagles-- a run-first team and a bad quarterback? Make it make sense to me.