Super Bowl 2025: Why Saquon Barkley and the Eagles will soar to title 

NEW ORLEANS

When Saquon Barkley first entered the Eagles' facility as the prize of the free agency class last March, he almost immediately felt something in the air.

Excitement? Anticipation? Smugness over having pilfered the Giants’ best player?

There was some of that, certainly. But the vibe was overshadowed by something else. It was a strange, uneasy mix of angst and regret and melancholy.

The Eagles had lost in the Super Bowl a little more than a year before Barkley’s arrival, They had had their 2023 season ended abruptly with an early playoff exit amid some tense relationships within the organization just weeks before.

“Even though I wasn’t part of that team . . . I felt like I was,” Barkley said. “I wasn’t there, but I could feel in my own body how it felt to have the confetti fall in the wrong color.”

Zack Baun, the other free-agent signing who went on to become a first-team All-Pro for the Eagles, sensed all of that too.

“I could feel the heartbreak and the uncomfortableness of what was going on, what they had experienced,” the linebacker said. “Immediately I could tell this team was on a mission to do something special.”

It’s almost accomplished.

That Super Bowl LIX on Sunday comes against the same Kansas City team that sent them into that eddy of doubt and frustration may seem like a sweet opportunity for revenge, but these aren’t the same Eagles who lost that excruciating game two years ago.

Sunday’s game can be called plenty of things for the Eagles — a legacy-defining opportunity for the players, a chance to unseat the NFL’s reigning dynasty, a shot at the title (which is something that always resonates in Philly’s sports soul) — but don’t call it a rematch.

These Eagles are different. They are better.

And that’s why they will win, not because of the players and coaches who were here last time but because of the ones who weren’t. Barkley and Baun. Jalen Carter and Quinyon Mitchell. Vic Fangio and Kellen Moore.

"It's not the same roster," Eagles cornerback Darius Slay said. “We're not the '22 roster, we're the '24 Eagles. So it's not the same roster. I think it's just the next big game we can have, and we're looking forward to it."

There is a phrase several of the Eagles kept coming back to this past week, and while no one was quite sure who started saying it (or perhaps not willing to out themselves for the act), it was repeated by many folks many times: “Don’t go chasing waterfalls.”

Adding a little TLC to LIX. Nice.

“Yeah, ‘don’t go chasing’ is I guess the main theme,” offensive tackle Lane Johnson said, using the shorthand version that drops the waterfalls part. “We can only control so much, so it was a funny inside joke.

“I think any adversity, it either makes you or breaks you,” Johnson added. “Yeah, the hunger’s there. It’s been there. It was motivational at times. But coming into this week, you have to be so in the moment, you can’t be worried about what’s going to happen, what’s happened in the past. You’ve got to go with it, man, and go forth.”

The Eagles stack up better than their opponent at just about every position on the field. They should be able to control both sides of the line of scrimmage, they have better athletes at receiver and in the secondary, and the league has no other running back as dynamic as Barkley right now.

The one area in which Kansas City has the edge, though, is the one that obviously can scuttle the whole thing. Patrick Mahomes elevates a team in a way few quarterbacks have been able to match. In clutch situations, he has proved to be nearly unstoppable no matter who surrounds him.

The one time he looked vulnerable, though, was when Tampa Bay attacked him and his protection was disappointing. Kansas City lost to Tom Brady and the Buccaneers, 31-9, in Super Bowl LV.

That needs to be the Eagles’ game plan on Sunday. If they can put the game out of reach early, the way they did in the NFC Championship Game against the Commanders, they’ll be sitting pretty. If it’s still competitive in the fourth quarter . . . gulp.

“You have to find a way to finish,” Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts said. “You know, coming into these opportunities in these games, everything is about finishing. You want to have the right focusing, and that comes with the preparation and the work that you put in, but ultimately it’s about finishing.”

While much focus is on Mahomes and his chance to three-peat, Hurts has an opportunity to do something fairly rare as well. Only three quarterbacks have ever lost their first Super Bowl start and returned to the game at any point to win: Len Dawson, Bob Griese and John Elway.

A footnote to that Broncos win by Elway: It came the year Terrell Davis set the record for most rushing yards by any player in a full season, the one that Barkley is 40 yards shy of topping.

The last quarterback to lose a Super Bowl debut and get back to the big game a second time was the Bills' Jim Kelly, who fell to the Giants after the 1990 season and then returned each of the next three seasons, all of them losses.

Hurts wasn’t born until five years after Kelly’s last Super Bowl appearance.

Failure is the diesel Hurts runs on. His benching at halftime of the national championship game for Alabama pushed him. Waiting until the second round for the Eagles to draft him has propelled him. And coming up short in Super Bowl LVII?

“It’s had a great driving force,” Hurts said. “It lit a flame, lit a fire in me, and to have this opportunity again is exactly what you work for."

It’s why the Eagles overhauled parts of their offensive line, coaching staff, skill positions. Not to have the same chance but to have a different one. This one.

Barkley knew that the moment he set foot in the building. Ten and a half months later, he finally has a chance to do something about it.

“Just trying to finish the job and get us all a ring,” he said.

He will.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.