Eagles show they're not dead yet

Next to Lane Johnson's locker at Lincoln Financial Field is the wide entrance that leads toward the shower stalls. He didn't have far to go when Sam Bradford gathered all the Eagles offensive players there for a meeting just before kickoff against the New Orleans Saints on Sunday, and he didn't have to hear much from Bradford to understand the consequences that the game's outcome could have for the Eagles' season.

"We just had an edge," Johnson said after the Eagles' 39-17 victory. "Nobody likes losing around here."

This was the setting for what could turn out to be the most famous shower scene since Janet Leigh checked into, and checked out at, the Bates Motel. In Johnson's telling, Bradford was the only player to speak during the meeting, telling his teammates: It's time to go. We have the talent. We have the ability. We just have to go out and get it done.

More than anything, Bradford was saying the sorts of things that football players think but usually do not say - that the Eagles' season was hanging in the balance Sunday, that the gap between being 2-3 and being 1-4 was too wide to measure, and that they all recognized it.

What they did Sunday was save themselves, for a while. There is no way to overstate how important it was to the Eagles and their season that they beat the Saints. Chip Kelly pooh-poohed the idea that, five weeks into a season, certain victories matter more than others in the NFL, but he's wrong. The parity throughout the league, the bunching of teams with the same or similar records, raises the stakes for intradivisional and intraconference games. Those are tiebreaker games. Those are the games, really, that decide a team's season. And the Eagles are 0-2 against the NFC East and were 0-3 against the NFC ahead of Sunday. So yes, this one mattered more.

"We didn't have to talk about it," safety Malcolm Jenkins said. "We understood today was a must-win game. You've got two 1-3 teams coming into this one, and [1-4] is going to be bad. That's a lot worse than 1-3. I think everybody understands the situation we're in. We've got a lot of mature guys on our team. They knew the magnitude of what we were doing."

Now they can get themselves back to .500, and get themselves a divisional victory, too, next Monday against the Giants. But make no mistake: This is a week-by-week thing for them, nothing more. It is too early in the season, and everything about them seems so fragile, and the Saints are such a mess, to assume that the Eagles turned some corner Sunday.

Bradford, for instance, looked more decisive and confident than he had in any previous game this season, finishing 32 of 45 for 333 yards and two touchdowns Sunday, minimizing the needless check-downs he relied on throughout the season's first three weeks. But his Scrubbing Bubbles-scented pep talk would have carried even more significance had he not thrown two end-zone interceptions - the first of which was a ghastly underthrow to a wide-open Riley Cooper.

There remains an uncertainty about Bradford, an always-pregnant anticipation that he will release the football just a bit late or make a damaging mistake, and it's impossible to know when that feeling will go away, if ever.

Kelly twice decided to go for it on fourth and long in New Orleans territory, once when a punt would have been the smarter choice, once when he could have opted for a long field goal . . . were his field-goal kicker not Caleb Sturgis, presumably.

Still, Sunday's second half was the most efficient and competent 30 minutes that the Eagles have played through their first five games. Admittedly, this standard is not high. But when the most egregious error over that long a period is another missed extra point by Sturgis, the Eagles will take it.

Mostly, though, we know that the Eagles are not dead, and that even when they win by a lopsided score, there will be little reassuring about it - no real sense that they've figured themselves out yet. They will have to slog through their schedule, week by week by week, because that is the team they appear to be, definitely for now, maybe for the whole season.

It would be nice to think of Bradford's brief speech as an inspirational turning point, but it didn't transform the Eagles as much as it reflected the magnitude of the moment.

"We all just felt like it was coming down to execution: 'We know how good we are. Let's get out of our own way,' " right guard Matt Tobin said. "Sam just said, 'Hey guys, you know I don't say much, but it's time for me to speak up.' It was good to hear that from him."

On to Monday night against the Giants, then. Win that one, get to 3-3, restore some stability to this season, and only then can everyone talk about the Eagles' washing away their ugly, ugly start.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski