David Murphy: Chris Jones got it backward. Winning ugly is what makes the Eagles great.

PHILADELPHIA — Are we really going to do this?

The Eagles have won 18 of their last 19 games. One of them was the Super Bowl. Two others were their first two games after the Super Bowl, also known as the first two games of this season. In the most recent of those two games, they beat the team they beat in the Super Bowl. Except, this time, they did it on the road. They also did it without seven players who either started or played 45% of the snaps in the Super Bowl, five of them on the defensive side of the field.

Oh, and they also beat the Cowboys.

Yet I’m supposed to believe that there is a critical mass of people out there who are sitting around looking at the 2-0 Eagles and thinking, “Meh — I expected more."?

Well, I don’t believe it. I have enough faith in this fan base, this media market, this city to assume that social media and talk radio are not a representative sample of prevailing opinion. That, or I think people are taking some liberties with their definition and deployment of words like “worry” and “concern” and “problem.”

While the Eagles are not a perfect team, and while they certainly have room for improvement, nothing that we’ve seen from them through the first two games of the season suggest that they are anything other than what we thought they were at the start. They are the best team in the National Football League, and there isn’t another NFC team that is particularly close. I think that opinion would be shared by the vast majority of football fans within the local market and a sizable proportion of those outside of it.

One might quibble with my projection of that second segment of folks. Eagles fans will certainly remind me that nobody likes us and we don’t care. They’ll point to various power rankings — ESPN’s latest has the Eagles second behind the Bills — and to the revival of the Tush Push debate as evidence that the Eagles still aren’t getting the respect they’ve earned. I’ll acknowledge those things. Where we differ is our interpretation.

See, I think people out of Philadelphia are engaged in an understandable yet misguided quest to convince themselves that the Eagles aren’t actually as good as they are. They desperately want to believe it. They need to believe it. Because, deep down inside, they recognize that the Eagles are playing a type of football that is nearly impossible to beat.

Je suis Chris Jones. That’s what I hear when somebody grumbles that the Eagles are winning ugly, or that they are winning unfairly, or that they are winning in spite of their quarterback, or their head coach, or their offensive coordinator.

It’s laughable to think that there is some kind of shame in winning ugly, if that’s what we want to call the way the Eagles are winning. Really, “winning ugly” is what makes them so great. Jones, the Chiefs’ All-Pro defensive tackle, had it backward when he started barking at the end of the Eagles’ 20-17 win over the Chiefs on Sunday. He mixed up his “and” and his “but.”

Improper framing, paraphrasing Jones: “You beat us, but you barely threw for 100 yards.”

Proper framing: “You beat us, and you barely threw for 100 yards.”

Over the last 15 seasons, the Eagles are the only team to finish the first two weeks of a season with a 2-0 record and fewer than 240 passing yards. They are one of only four to be undefeated with fewer than 520 total yards. That group of teams includes the 2015 Broncos, who went on to win the Super Bowl. Good teams that are capable of winning the way the Eagles are winning tend to be some of the best teams.

Think about it. The Eagles are 2-0 with wins over their biggest division rival and the team they beat in the Super Bowl, and they’ve done it with A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith having combined for 13 catches and 104 yards. Saquon Barkley is on pace to finish with 872 fewer rushing yards than he had last season. Last year, we saw the Eagles win the vast majority of their games on the strength of those three players. This year, we’re seeing that they can win even when Jahan Dotson is their second-leading receiver. Jones was right. Hurts threw for only 101 yards on Sunday. That’s the whole point!

At some point this season, the Eagles will encounter a game in which they need more from Hurts and Brown and Smith than they’ve needed the first couple of weeks. If they don’t get it, they’ll be in trouble. But it isn’t fair to assume they won’t get it based on what we’ve seen in two games that they’ve won. Against both the Cowboys and Chiefs, the Eagles played exactly how they needed to play to win.

“When you look at when we game plan and stuff like that, that’s obviously always the first thing we do is [ask], ‘How do we want to push the ball down the field?’ ” offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo said earlier this week. “As a staff, we work really hard on the plan, especially these next couple days, to put that on there and that’s a part of it. Sometimes, in-game, it just doesn’t happen. It’s definitely something we want to do. It’s not something we’re avoiding. I know going forward, we have the plan in place, and if it comes up, it’ll definitely happen.”

Until then, the Eagles have nothing to be ashamed about the way they’ve played these first couple of games. It’s not the teams that win ugly you have to worry about. It’s the teams that can’t.