what years did the eagles go to the superbowl

Tedy Bruschi sacks Donovan McNabb in Super Bowl XXXIX. Associated Printing

News flash: The Philadelphia Eagles have never won a Super Bowl.

Pretty shocking, right? I'll bet yous hadn't heard that yet this week.

Just the Eagles have come close to Super Bowl glory on several notable occasions, and a loss Sunday to the New England Patriots in Minneapolis would make them one of but three teams with three-plus Super Basin appearances and zero Vince Lombardi Trophies (the Minnesota Vikings and Buffalo Bills are both 0-of-4).

Information technology's too possible the Eagles pull off the upset in Super Bowl LII. The Pats are merely 4.5-betoken favorites, and underdogs have won five of the last six Super Bowls.

Earlier that does or doesn't happen, let'south remind anybody—with aid from legendary Eagles play-by-play vocalisation Merrill Reese—what Eagles fans have endured over the last six decades by reliving 5 times Philly had a shot at Super Bowl success.

1966: A mild flirtation

Running dorsum Timmy Brown. Bill Ingraham/Associated Press

The Eagles really had an outside shot at winning the start Super Bowl. Six years removed from their last NFL championship, they had their first winning flavor (9-5) since 1961. Only the Light-green Bay Packers (12-2) and Dallas Cowboys (10-three-i)—who would meet in a closely fought NFL Championship Game after winning their respective conferences—won more than games.

Had Philadelphia defeated Dallas on the road in Calendar week five, the Eagles would have represented the Eastern Conference in the NFL title game, which the Cowboys lost by a touchdown before Dark-green Bay crushed the Kansas Urban center Chiefs in Super Bowl I.

Led by quarterback Norm Snead and playmakers Timmy and Bob Brown, the Eagles got hot late, winning their final four games. But they were cold when they played in Dallas in October, and the Cowboys,clearly the better squad, won 56-7. Although Philly did upset Dallas at home afterwards in the flavour, information technology was too little, too late.

The Eagles lost the NFL'southward 3rd-place game (yep, that was a thing back so) 20-xiv to the Baltimore Colts, but they were one of a handful of teams in the mix for the starting time Super Bowl.

Many Eagles fans might not realize that, considering that i competitive flavour was surrounded by well-nigh two decades' worth of inadequacy.

"To me, the years between 1960 and the Dick Vermeil era all kind of run together as diverse forms of collapse," said the 75-yr-old Reese, in a conversation with Bleacher Report. "Some teams were borderline and weren't completely futile, and others were out of it past Twenty-four hours 1. Those post-1960 years were difficult for a decade-and-a-one-half, and if there were any good ones hither and in that location, they faded away."

1980: The year it was supposed to come up together

Ron Jaworski quarterbacked the 1980 Eagles to their commencement Super Basin appearance. Nate Fine/Getty Images

Fourteen non-beginning-identify years afterwards, the Eagles had been building momentum nether head coach Dick Vermeil and quarterback Ron Jaworski. With help from Pro Bowl running back Wilbert Montgomery, veteran receiver Harold Carmichael, emerging star nose tackle Charlie Johnson and sack maestro Claude Humphrey, they made the playoffs for the first time in modernistic NFL history in 1978, won their offset playoff game in 1979 and and so won their first NFC East title in 1980.

Philly's 12-four record was tied for tops in the league, while the defense surrendered a league-low xiii.nine points per game. They hands tending of the Vikings and the 12-win Cowboys to attain their first Super Bowl (XV). They were three-point favorites against the Oakland Raiders, a wild-card entry into the AFC playoffs.

"The Eagles beat the Raiders during the regular flavor," recalled Reese, who has served equally the vox of the Eagles in 1977. "A lot of people felt that the win over Dallas in the NFC Championship Game was the Eagles' Super Bowl, and that the Oakland game would exist kind of anticlimactic. Unfortunately, the team also played that way."

Indeed, later on Jim Plunkett's Raiders took a fourteen-0 first-quarter lead, the Eagles never cut the deficit to unmarried digits. They fell 27-10 in a dud performance, becoming the first favorite to lose the Super Bowl in a decade.

The Eagles made the playoffs once again in 1981 but weren't a major contender, losing to the New York Giants in the Wild Card Game. Jaworski never returned to his 1980 form, Vermeil retired (for the kickoff time, anyhow) after the 1982 flavor and the Eagles soon barbarous into another run of mediocrity.

2001: Could've been greater than the 'Greatest Show on Turf'

Donovan McNabb and Rams QB Kurt Warner. MORRY GASH/Associated Press/Associated Press/Associated Press

Betwixt 1981 and 1999, the Eagles won merely ii playoff games and just a single division title. Meanwhile, their division rivals, the Cowboys, Giants and Washington Redskins, won a combined eight Super Bowls.

Merely the franchise experienced a turn-of-the-century revival under head autobus Andy Reid, star quarterback Donovan McNabb and impact defenders Troy Vincent, Brian Dawkins, Hugh Douglas and Jeremiah Trotter.

Thank you to ascendant performances from that cadre, they easily won the NFC East in 2001 earlier handily defeating the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Chicago Bears in the playoffs. And while nobody expected them to beat the eventual fourteen-point Super Bowl favorite St. Louis Rams in the NFC Championship Game, the Eagles came pretty damn close.

"I remember the fact that the Eagles actually stayed competitive until the very end," said Reese, who will call his third Super Bowl on Sunday. "They played that game a lot more competitively than most thought they would."

Philly led 17-13 at halftime, despite the fact McNabb was strip-sacked 17 seconds into the game (leading to a Rams touchdown). The Rams scored the game's next 16 points to take a 29-17 lead, but the Eagles didn't become away. McNabb ran for a touchdown with three minutes to play, the defense forces a three-and-out and Philly had the ball back near midfield down by v with 2:20 remaining.

Merely iv plays later, McNabb was intercepted by Aeneas Williams, and Philly'south chances of pulling off the upset disappeared.

The following Sunday, the New England Patriots did in fact pull off the upset over St. Louis in Super Basin XXXVI.

2004: T.O.'south heroics, McNabb'south dry out heaves

The Eagles lost the adjacent two NFC title games past double-digit margins earlier finally getting through in 2004. And, man, did that '04 team feel special: They won a franchise-record 13 games, and they were 13-1 before resting their starters for the final 2 weeks of the regular season.

The simply trouble: All-Pro broad receiver Terrell Owens sprained his talocrural joint and bankrupt his fibula in Week fifteen.

The Eagles yet vanquish the Vikings and Atlanta Falcons sans Owens in their beginning two playoff games, but they were probable going to be in trouble against the Patriots in Super BasinXXXIX without 1 of the league's nigh dangerous offensive weapons. Owens knew it, and he limped out at that place against doctors' orders.

He caught nine passes for 122 yards, keeping Philly in the game.

They still trailed past x in the fourth quarter when McNabb led them on an excruciatingly slow-paced touchdown drive to bring the deficit to iii. The highly criticized, albeit successful, 13-play bulldoze took nigh four minutes off the clock, forcing the Eagles to effort an onside boot inside the two-infinitesimal warning.

After, it was widely speculated that McNabb was vomiting and/or dry-heaving during that possession, and onetime teammates Jon Ritchie and Lito Sheppard take both since stated that the quarterback got ill with the game on the line.

The onside kick failed, and at that place wasn't much hope left when the offense got it back inside their ain five-yard line with no timeouts and 46 seconds left. A Rodney Harrison interception iced it, and the Eagles haven't played in a Super Bowl since.

While McNabb still takes heat for his performance in crunch fourth dimension that evening, Reese believes the loss had a lot more than to practice with how the Patriots dominated the Eagles in the trenches.

"In that location's been a lot of focus on McNabb, who a lot of people think choked at the stop of that game, but I think if yous look advisedly, you'll find that the Eagles were beaten on both sides of the line of scrimmage," said the league'south longest-tenured play-by-play announcer. "Their offensive line was ravaged past the Patriots pass rush and gave McNabb very piddling fourth dimension to get rid of the football game. And conversely, the Eagles never really penetrated and Tom Brady could have read a book and notwithstanding found fourth dimension to go downfield to Deion Co-operative."

2008: Some other title-game letdown

David J. Phillip/Associated Press

The McNabb-led Eagles came within ane game of the Super Bowl 4 years later. They grabbed a wild-bill of fare spot thank you to 4 wins in their final five games, beat the Vikings and Giants by double-digit margins in back-to-back road playoff games and so found themselves leading the Arizona Cardinals 25-24 in the fourth quarter of the NFC Title Game.

The Eagles had overcome a 24-vi halftime deficit with iii unanswered touchdowns. But Cards quarterback Kurt Warner led a beautiful 14-play, viii-minute bulldoze that culminated in a back-breaking Tim Hightower touchdown which gave Arizona a 32-25 lead with less than three minutes to play.

McNabb and Co. once once more plant themselves with the ball and a chance to necktie or win a championship game in the final minutes, but afterwards driving just inside Arizona territory, they turned it over on downs on four consecutive McNabb incompletions. That was pretty much it.

"It was a game that should have been won," recalled Reese. "They stumbled around in the outset half, they did come back in the second half, but there were missed tackles on the Hightower touchdown that broke their backs, and when they tried to come dorsum from that there was a very controversial non-call on a pass intended for Kevin Curtis.

"And that was confronting a squad that they had browbeaten on Thanksgiving dark. It'south a game they should have won, only they didn't."

Had they held on in Arizona, the Eagles could take put up a fight against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLIII, just as the Cardinals did. That Philly squad had a lot of momentum and was much better than its ix-6-1 record. In fact, according to Football Outsiders, the 2008 Eagles were the league'southward best team in terms of DVOA (Defense force-adjusted Value Over Average).

There'southward no trophy for that, however. And Eagles fans are left wondering what could have been in an all-Pennsylvania Super Bowl had their team been able to concur on in Arizona.

What about 2017?

Nick Foles throws to Alshon Jeffery. Eric Gay/Associated Press/Associated Press

Unfortunately for the Eagles and their fans, there'south a stiff gamble this experience will be added to the list of "close merely no cigar" moments in the franchise'southward long, painful history

Only it could exist years before we even have a risk to reflect on those flirtations again, because just getting close is hard plenty. Information technology took the Eagles 15 years to make their outset Super Bowl, another quarter-century to participate in their second and some other 13 to earn a spot in their tertiary.

Reese appreciates just how rare these chances are whenreflecting on the team's mentality afterwards the first Super Bowl loss in 1980.

"The next day, we flew back to Philadelphia, and I remember going onto the plane with the players and everybody was saying, 'Adjacent yr, we're going to go back and win this thing,'" he remembered. "Well, 'adjacent year' didn't come up for 24 more years.

"What that tells me is when y'all get to one of these things, as promising as your hereafter may be, as deep and as young as your squad may exist, you take to take advantage, considering yous never know."

Brad Gagnon has covered the NFL for Bleacher Study since 2012.

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Source: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2756585-reliving-the-philadelphia-eagles-past-chances-at-super-bowl-glory

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