David Murphy: The Eagles have made Patrick Mahomes a home underdog. Here's why that matters.

David Murphy, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sep 13, 2025

Published in Football

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PHILADELPHIA — Turnovers, injuries, officiating and disqualifying unsportsmanlike conduct penalties.

That’s the list of the most likely variables that would lead to an Eagles loss on Sunday. Are there others? Sure. Even the greatest of teams can get beat by Patrick Mahomes when he goes full Superman. Andy Reid has watched the Super Bowl tape enough times that he may start hearing hidden messages in it. These still are the Chiefs, and it still is Arrowhead Stadium; the Eagles still are in the part of the NFL season in which they may not yet fully be the team they will ultimately become. Yet, that only leads me closer to my point.

The Eagles will have accomplished something even before they take the field on Sunday. They will be expected to win.

In each of the four previous meetings between the Eagles and Chiefs in the Nick Sirianni/Jalen Hurts Era, I’ve approached the game with an edge toward the Chiefs engrained in my priors. They are as close as a team has come to the Patriots of the first decade of the 2000s. Even before you evaluated the matchups or considered the circumstances, the venue, or the injuries, you assigned one key variable: “They’re the Patriots.”

That is no longer the case with the Eagles and the Chiefs. You can argue it shouldn’t have been the case before last year’s Super Bowl. But it was. That’s part of the reason 40-22 felt so wild and unpredictable and life affirming. Nobody expected it. Anybody who says otherwise is backfilling their brain.

I’m not saying that nobody thought the Eagles were the significantly better team. Many of us in this market thought that, myself included. But, deep down inside, that one key variable still existed: “They’re the Chiefs. So we’ll see.”

The difference between this game and the four games prior is that the Chiefs are the Chiefs no longer. The Eagles are the Eagles, now.

The distinction I’m drawing is one that the fan base has spent the offseason basking in. For the first time in my lifetime, I would enter an NFL season believing to my core that the Eagles indisputably were the best team in the NFL, by a wide margin.

They haven’t yet reached peak Chiefs, and certainly not peak Patriots. But they are closer to it than any other team has come, and they are much closer to it than they are the rest of the pack. It isn’t just the two Super Bowl appearances in three seasons. Nor is it their plus-399 point differential during that span, which is an absurd 72 points higher than the next closest NFC team (the 49ers), and 103 points higher than the Chiefs. What distinguishes the Eagles is more abstract than that. They’ve reached the point where any loss is an upset, regardless of the opponent.

The open market is the best indicator, as is usually the case. The Eagles opened as a 1.5-point underdog this week. They quickly flipped to a 1.5-point favorite. If the line holds up to kickoff, it will be just the second time since 2015 that the Chiefs were a home underdog in a meaningful regular season game with Patrick Mahomes at quarterback (they went off getting 2.5 points from the Bills as a home dog in Week 6 of 2022). This, per Pro-Football-Reference.com.

Side note: The Bills and Ravens are the two AFC teams with a point differential better than the Eagles over the last three seasons, at plus-487 and plus-416, respectively. That’s one of the knocks against the Eagles that keeps them out of the peak Chiefs/Patriots realm. It’s fair to wonder whether the Eagles would have two Super Bowl berths if the road to the NFC title included teams on the level of Baltimore/Buffalo/Kansas City, not to mention Joe Burrow in the years in which the Bengals actually make the playoffs. From 2019 to 2021, the Chiefs had a plus-433 point differential with two Super Bowl appearances and one title. In addition to being higher than the Eagles’ plus-399 from 2022 to 2024, the Chiefs played in the same conference as the next two teams on the list, the Bills (plus-399) and the Ravens (plus-386).

All in due time, perhaps. Eagles fans will need a little dramatic tension at this point. They play in a division where two teams are dead on arrival, and the third was trounced by them in last year’s NFC championship game. The 49ers are reeling. The Lions may already have peaked. Frankly, the NFL needs the Packers to be as good as they’ve looked in Weeks 1 and 2. Otherwise, who can come close to beating the Eagles in the NFC?

The Eagles are an imperfect team. They might be a lesser team if they can’t find an edge rush or someone to fill the void(s) left by the departures of C.J. Gardner-Johnson and Darius Slay. But, in the arc of history, they still are a team on the rise. The Chiefs have looked like the opposite in recent seasons, including a Week 1 loss to the Chargers. They still are hopelessly reliant upon/addicted to the short passing game. They have given up on running the ball. There is value on the Eagles in the alternate line.

It’s a fascinating place for a team to be, let alone for a team from our humble city. Not because the Eagles are favored to beat the Chiefs. But because anything else would be a letdown.