Ninety miles to the west of Philadelphia lies the site of Three Mile Island, which became the butt of many sick jokes after what happened there in 1979.
The jokes included "The weather forecast for Three Mile Island: Hazy, hot and humid, high near 3,000 degrees," and "What's black and white and glows in the dark?", the answer being, "A nun at Three Mile Island."
On Sunday, a meltdown of a different sort occurred at Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field — and it wasn't very funny, either.
The 49ers handed Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni his first-ever career home playoff defeat, 23-19. In the game, Philadelphia kicker Jake Elliott missed his sixth career extra point in the playoffs (ironically, he has missed only one field goal attempt in the postseason during his entire NFL career), forcing the Eagles to go for a touchdown late in the game, instead of having a chance at a potential field goal which would have sent the game into overtime.
But there was plenty of blame to go around: the Philadelphia secondary got burned for 15.3 yards per completion (how bad is that? Washington allowed 12.5 yards per completion in 2025 — and that ranked last in the league) and even got singed on a trick play when San Francisco wide receiver Jauan Jennings threw a 29-yard touchdown pass to Christian McCaffrey on the first play of the fourth quarter, giving San Francisco the lead.
Meanwhile, pressure is growing on Jeffrey Lurie and Howie Roseman to fire offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo — and even defensive coordinator Vic Fangio, whose gameplan resembled that of Billy "Brokeback Mountain" Davis, who earned that moniker under Chip Kelly with this passive philosophy, also coming under fire on Sunday, when Purdy was sacked only once (a base 4-3 in Philadelphia would make far more sense, given the personnel the Eagles have on that side of the ball, than the 3-4 that Fangio insists on using; under just-fired Arizona head coach Jonathan Gannon, the Eagles had 70 sacks operating out of the 4-3, compared with just 42 in 2025).
It's just like the late Buddy Ryan said: if you bend but don't break, your offense is going to have to go 80 or more yards to score a touchdown, and that's simply too far — and make no mistake about it: the 3-4 is a bend-but-don't-break, finesse defense.
In the event that Patullo is fired (quite likely), possible successors include recently fired NFL head coaches John Harbaugh, who was actually an assistant coach for the Eagles from 1998 through 2007, and Mike McDaniel, who held the head job at Miami for four seasons beginning in 2022 after prior stints as an assistant at Denver, Houston, Washington, the UFL's California/Sacramento franchise (that league, by the way, begins its new season on March 27), Cleveland, Atlanta, and San Francisco.
But since both Harbaugh and McDaniel have been head coaches and may be looking for another such job, an interesting possibility for Philadelphia could be Harold Goodwin, who worked under Bruce Arians at Arizona and is now the running game coordinator at Carolina; given his philosophy, Goodwin would no doubt want the Eagles to draft the ultra-fast wide receiver Zachariah Branch of Georgia, who is the great-nephew of Cliff Branch, late of the Raiders.
In Sunday's game, Sirianni and wide receiver A.J. Brown — who is a cancer in more ways than one in that his birthday is June 30! — got into it hard and heavy at one point. Maybe that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back?
Once the Eagles lost at home to the Bears the day after Thanksgiving, and then Chicago roared back to defeat Green Bay in a wild card game on Saturday night, Philadelphia's chances of repeating as Super Bowl champions had shrunk to almost nothing.
On Sunday, those chances merely became absolutely nothing.
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