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The Eagles will play Sunday in Washington, and if the reports are accurate, they will be in deep trouble.

The reports from 2016, soon after the NFL Draft, the ones about Carson Wentz, who has become the Commanders’ quarterback. The ones from 2017, when he was an MVP runner-up the year the Eagles won the whole thing. The ones that claimed he bleeds winning, as Doug Pederson once said. The ones that labeled him a franchise quarterback, worthy of spending five draft choices just to move up to acquire his rights.

The ones like this: “The fun about watching Carson play is you don’t know what he’ll do next. But the result is usually good and it has helped his teammates become true believers.” That one was from Malcolm Jenkins, known as a locker-room fountain of honesty, during that Super Bowl run.

Then there was Howie Roseman, early in 2022, all mushy about it all. “When you have players like that, they are like fingers on your hand,” he said. “You can’t even imagine that they are not part of you, that they are not here.”

“That’s how we feel about Carson.”

Even a sitting president, Barack Obama, once  grabbed a microphone and issued this advisory to Eagles fans: “Get on the Wentz Wagon.” Applause ensued.

So, obviously, as they are about to face a franchise quarterback who bleeds winning and is so fun to watch that a personnel director cannot imagine him playing anywhere else and whom the Leader of the Free World endorses, the Eagles are in deep as they attempt to improve to 3-0.

So the quotes didn’t age well and political hot-takes often turn chilly. Wentz never really recovered from his injuries and became a turnover conveyor belt. And those yellowed scouting reports became good only as cautionary exhibits that a franchise quarterback is something that cannot simply be delivered is if by Door Dash.

Eventually, the Eagles, who had Jalen Hurts in reserve, would offload their top 2016 draft choice at a discount to Indianapolis, where he failed, and the Colts dumped him in Washington. And son of a gun if Wentz didn’t bleed winning in Week 1 against Pederson in Jacksonville, hurling four touchdown passes.

“You’re going to have to win this,” Commanders coach Ron Rivera told Wentz before that late-game rally. Wentz’s response: “I will.”

So maybe Wentz has found his football happy place. Maybe he has regained top fitness at age 29. Maybe he needed that run-up to the Big 3-0 to develop fully as a quarterback, a position routinely best handled by older professionals. Maybe Rivera is the right coach to maximize his gifts, and there are many.

If so, Eagles fans will be miserable, not just because it means Wentz can lift Washington back into NFC East relevance, but because they tend to despise the man. They can be that way, Eagles fans. The other night, because they can be bullies, they chose to boo former Eagle Jalen Reagor of the Vikings simply because he was not as good as advertised. Had the game Sunday been scheduled for the Linc, Wentz would have expected three-plus hours of heckling, for rarely in Philadelphia had an athlete gone from being so celebrated to so despised so quickly. And there have been one or two.

“I don’t know,” Wentz told reporters the other day. “That’s such a big question that I’ve answered many times. One thing I look back on was, ‘Man, I could have been better here. I could have been better as a person, as a teammate.’

“I definitely cherished my time I had up there. It was definitely a wild ride in many, many ways.”

Cantankerous as some Philadelphia fans can be, there were reasons for their change of heart. For one, Wentz turned from MVP-like in 2017 to lousy by 2020. Not sub-par. Not average. Lousy. He completed just 57.4 percent of his passes and led football with 15 interceptions. When he was at his best, he flashed a mystical ability to avoid a pass rush, ducking under would-be tacklers to complete highlight plays. By 2020, he was sacked 50 times. His performance was poor, his body language worse. And by then, there were already hints that the Eagles would be better with Hurts.

But there was more to the Wentz tumble from Philadelphia popularity. While impossible to prove, he projected the image that he never really bought into the area, rarely making himself available off hours, rarely providing much public insight beyond off-brand postgame cliches. And even he has acknowledged that he could have been a better teammate. Yet he was never accused of not putting in the required hours to succeed. It just didn’t work for him in Philadelphia, that’s all. And vice-versa.

So off to Indy it was, then to Landover, Md., where Sunday he can catch the Eagles in a trap game. If so, don’t be surprised. It was all there in the reports.

Contact Jack McCaffery at jmccaffery@delcotimes.com

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