Eagles veterans explain how they got over Super Bowl loss originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
He obsessed over the mistakes, he studied the breakdowns, he lamented about lost opportunities.
And then at some point, A.J. Brown snapped out of it.
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It was time to move on from the Super Bowl.
“In terms of that game, you just can’t dwell on it,” Brown said Wednesday. “That’s life. Not everything’s going to go your way. And at some point, you’ve got to get off the mat and you’ve gotta get back working, and I think that’s where this team is at right now.
“Definitely have that chip on our shoulder but still taking it day by day. Still early, you know? Building a house, brick by brick. … It’s a new season. We’re 0-0 like everybody else.”
This is a significant week for the Eagles as they participate in voluntary practice at the NovaCare Complex. Because we’ve had free agency and we’ve had the draft and we’ve had the schedule release, but for the 58 guys on the roster who were here last year, it’s the first real chance to turn the page as a team.
“It’s not hard to do because this is our lives,” Brown said. “We’re world-class athletes for a reason.
“Adversity happens. That was a big one. It’s the Super Bowl. But as athletes we face adversity all the time and even if it’s small adversity, we face it, and we have to deal with it. I look at it terms of, ‘That’s just life,’ you know?”
We all know the history of teams that lose the Super Bowl.
Since 1992, when the Bills lost their fourth straight Super Bowl, only one team that’s lost a Super Bowl has made it back the next year. That was the 2018 Patriots, who lost to the Eagles in Super Bowl LII in 2017 and then beat the Rams a year later.
The last NFC team to lose a Super Bowl and return the next year is the early 1970s Vikings, who lost to the Dolphins in Super Bowl VIII in 1973 and got back a year later and lost to the Steelers in Super Bowl IX.
But 13 of the last 15 Super Bowl losers did have a winning record a year later, and the last two – the 2021 Chiefs and 2022 Bengals – both won 12 games.
This is a very talented 2023 Eagles team with a loaded roster. The biggest challenge they’ll face could very well be the daunting mental task of coming so close to winning a championship – they led by 10 at halftime and the game was tied with 8 seconds left – and then starting over a year later.
“Personally, for me, after the Super Bowl, I couldn’t wait to get back,” Dallas Goedert said. “That was the toughest loss I’ve ever had in my career, and the only thing I wanted to do from that time on was get back and start this new season so we can go out there and prove (we can do it).
“I think if anything, it puts a chip on the entire team’s shoulder. And based on what we’ve done in OTAs, it looks like that’s the entire team’s mindset and it looks like we’ve got a lot of guys who are super hungry to try to replicate the season we had last year.”
Goedert said the Eagles don’t sit around and talk about how hungry they are for the 2023 season and to try to get one step further than they did last year.
You can just tell.
“It’s kind of unspoken,” he said. “It’s more just you can kind of feel it throughout. When we’re in the weight room, when we’re doing our conditioning after, everybody’s hungry, everybody’s grinding, they’re working hard in there. Nobody’s content with last year and thinks we can do it all again just because we did it last year.
“You can just see people working hard and focusing, listening to the coaches in meetings, looking at the details, when we get on the field you can see that the meetings are carrying over to the field, so I think that just shows that we’re ready to start climbing the mountain again.”
If anybody has the right to dwell on the way last season and the way the last game ended it’s veteran cornerback James Bradberry.
He said it wasn’t hard to move on.
“All that stuff’s in the past,” he said Wednesday. “I was just around my family and they definitely helped me get my mind off the game. I’m the kind of guy (who believes) you’ve got to put it behind you. … You’ve got to prove it again.”
Brown took the loss hard. They all did. Especially the veterans. Because you never know if you’ll get back.
But he emphasized how important it is to let go, remain positive and keep working just as hard to get back there.
“Of course, you could want something so bad, but if it’s not your time it’s not your time and get back to work,” Brown said. “Don’t quit, because you never know because next time could be your time.”
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