Now Chip Kelly has to pick up the pieces

GREEN BAY - That Chip Kelly will earn his money this week goes without saying. It is just different than usual. In two seasons, we have seen him create a new culture and we have seen him scheme with the best of them. But we have never seen him have to look a good team in the eye and convince the players that they are, indeed, still good.

This week, that is Kelly's job. As he said after the debris stopped raining down, "I told them we've got to stick together. Win or lose, rain or shine, we're a team."

Once the Eagles got their feet under them last season, they won seven of eight down the stretch and never really got smacked in the face. Now, they have been: Packers 53, Eagles 20. And now we get to see if Chip Kelly can pick up the pieces.

"We just got outexecuted," quarterback Mark Sanchez said. "Offense, defense, special teams, coaches - that was coach's message after the game, that we're all in on this.

"Now we're going to find out who we are. It's easy when you're on the other end of this thing like we were last week. You're on national TV and everything's going great and you can't miss and you score a lot of points and defense and special teams scored. That's fun and it's easy - but now it's tough. This is going to be a really good test for this team. I'm excited because I think we have the type of players that can bounce back from this."

With that hint of Kelly's postgame speech, the process has begun. Kelly hasn't had to do it before, not with the Eagles. They took a big wallop last season against Denver, and Nick Foles had the terrible game against Dallas - but the whole thing was embryonic then. Nobody knew if they were good or not, and most people suspected they weren't. It was harder in one sense because they were just starting out, but it was easier because there were no expectations.

Now, there are - and some teams can find out that lugging expectations around for an entire season can be exhausting. The Eagles arrived at Lambeau Field thinking they could play with the Packers. They came here believing that the NFC could possibly be theirs, starting with this game, this day.

But then came the avalanche. In a game that everybody around the league will use as a standard by which to measure relative strength, the Eagles came up relatively puny. They had no pass rush and Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers carved them up. On the other side of the ball, well, let's just say that the air has begun leaking from the Mark Sanchez balloon.

Losing the game was no disgrace - like when they got hit by the last wild punch a couple of weeks ago at Arizona. Good teams, trading shots, losing on the road, OK. But this game was different because, this week, the Eagles didn't show up. It was hard to decide which disappointment was bigger - Rodgers' exposure of the Eagles' pass defense, or Sanchez's inability to muster much of anything when it mattered against a pretty ordinary defense.

The NFL is a week-to-week league and everybody knows it. That undoubtedly will be Kelly's message to his players this week - that this was one horrendous game, yes, but it still was only one game. It is pretty standard stuff from the NFL coaching manual.

As Kelly said at his press conference, he didn't know if it would be easy or hard for the team to shake this loss, "But I know these guys always come to work. So they'll be ready to work when we get back on Tuesday."

Still, getting players to believe it is something completely different than merely saying it. We have all seen teams that allow their disappointments to linger. It is perhaps the ultimate sign of a good NFL team, the ability to compartmentalize disaster and move on - but not everybody does it.

The Eagles have a game next week against Tennessee in which they will be comfortably favored, and then comes the three-game stretch that will decide everything: at Dallas on Thanksgiving, home for Seattle, home for Dallas. They need to refocus, immediately.

The upcoming noise will not be joyful. Anybody with eyes can see that the Eagles are 7-3, yes, but that the three losses have come against the three best teams they have played: at San Francisco by five, at Arizona by four, and now at Green Bay by what seemed like 104. It is true that Lambeau is a place where a team can get steamrolled if it isn't careful, but this was crazy. If the Eagles believe themselves to be legit, this was absurd.

In the fourth week of the season, New England got embarrassed by Kansas City, 41-14. The obituaries for the Bill Belichick/Tom Brady era were written and filed - and, well, the Patriots have not lost since.They somehow used the disappointment and the doubt as fuel. It is what good teams do.

Or, as guard Evan Mathis said, "Hopefully this brings us together."

That is the ideal. But, really, what kind of team are the Eagles? We're about to find out during what is a crucial stretch for the head coach.

On Twitter: @theidlerich

Blog: ph.ly/DNL