Saquon Barkley boldly claims that 2024 Eagles were 'a top-five team of all time'

Yahoo

22-05-2025

We're only a few months removed from the Philadelphia Eagles' dominant Super Bowl win to close out the 2024-2025 season. But it's been long enough for Eagles running back Saquon Barkley to make some bold claims about last season's team.
On an episode of "Exciting Mics" — a podcast co-hosted by Barkley's Eagles teammates Cooper DeJean and Reed Blankenship — released on Thursday, Barkley told the defensive backs that he believed last year's team should be valued as one of the best teams all-time.
"I firmly believe when you look at our team that we had last year, I think we're a top-five team of all time. And I tell my boys this all the time. Like if you really look at the season, outside the first four games, it was belt to a**," Barkley said. "How dominant you guys were on defense, and how dominant we were on offensive and special teams — people don't realize how great of a team that actually was."
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"We were working together," Blankenship chimed in. "After the bye week, we just bought in."
Barkley agreed, and added, "When you have the talent and skill that we have in our team, mixed with the coaches, we all play together like how we played, teams really stood no chance."
Barkley, DeJean and Blankenship are obviously going to be a bit biased when it comes to the Eagles. But does Barkley's claim hold water?
Barkley's key caveat — "outside the first four games" — is kind of a hard one to overlook. The Eagles lost two of their first four games of the year; their two victories were only one-score wins. After a bye week in Week 5, Philadelphia went on a much better run, going 12-1, before cruising through four playoffs games to win the Super Bowl. But to ignore those first low-scoring games feels like a major oversight.
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Otherwise, when looking at the season-long stats, the 2024-25 Philadelphia Eagles were an excellent team — especially, as Barkley noted, on defense. The Eagles were arguably the best defense in the league last year, allowing by far the fewest yards (4732), the fewest offensive plays (999) and the fewest passing yards allowed (2961), per Pro Football Reference. Opposing teams averaged only 4.7 yards per play, and only one team allowed fewer points — the Chargers, who allowed two fewer points in total.
Philadelphia's offense was also incredibly strong, though less so comparatively than its defense: The Eagles had one of the best scoring offenses in the league, but was seventh in key offensive stats like total points and points per game. Philadelphia was top 10 in most of the special teams stats as well.
But calling the team all-time great might be a little bit too strong. Even in defense, Philadelphia's strongest area, the '24-25 Eagles don't quite measure up to some of the greatest defensive teams in the NFL's history.
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Last season, Philadelphia had a DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) of 21.3%, per Joseph Acosta of SB Nation. That number, per Acosta is lower than some of the top Super Bowl-winning teams of the past two decades, including the 2004 New England Patriots, 2013 Seattle Seahawks and 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Those teams (two Tom Brady-led squads, and the Seahawks at the peak of the Legion of Boom era) alone are hard for the 2024 Eagles to square up against — and that's not including all of the legendary teams that came before the turn of the century.
With that said, last season's Philadelphia team was a great, cohesive squad — enough that the organization is sticking with most of its biggest pieces. Barkley got a massive extension that can keep him in Philadelphia potentially through 2028; Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni agreed to a multi-year extension of his own. Now, Barkley and the team will just have to try and replicate that success next season.