PHILADELPHIA — A.J. Brown was wrong about one thing.

The Eagles offense isn’t a bleep show.

It isn’t any kind of show at all.

At this point, it’s just plain ol’ bleep.

If that sounds harsh, well, harsh is a pretty good word to describe the experience of watching the Eagles offense right now. The play-calling lacks imagination. The run-blocking lacks the dominance that was once its hallmark. The quarterback has always lacked aggression. Now, he lacks accuracy, too.

That’s not an ideal formula. There are all kinds of ways you can shrug off the staggering ineptitude the Eagles displayed while muddling their way to a 16-9 win over the Detroit Lions on Sunday night. It’s an easy thing to do when your defense consistently forces opponents to play bleepier than you. The Eagles are 8-2, with the best Super Bowl odds in the NFC, and victories over four of the five teams whose odds are just behind theirs. That stuff matters. But you can’t shrug off the one question that every team with Super Bowl aspirations must constantly ask itself.

Are we a championship team in our current form?

That the Eagles can even think about answering yes is a testament to how good they are everywhere outside of offensive execution.

Brown said it best on Sunday night.

“This team is resilient,” said the Eagles’ wide receiver, who broke free of his recent on-field anonymity with 11 targets and seven catches, albeit for only 49 yards. “Show up, work hard, find a way, no matter what it looks like.”

Brown is right. And he has been right all along. The Eagles are a very good team. Winning football games is important. But so is progress. Right now, the Eagles are a long way off from being the best team they can be.

Nothing that we saw from them on Sunday night suggests their fundamental problem has been solved. It isn’t just that the Eagles aren’t scoring enough points. It’s that they don’t appear to be getting any better.

They have scored 17 or fewer in four of their last six games, including a combined 26 in their last two. Are they capable of winning a Super Bowl in their current form? Absolutely. But you can’t ignore how different their current form is from the one that saw them win the Super Bowl last season.

For the second straight game, and for the fifth time this season, the Eagles failed to crack 300 yards of total offense. That only happened three times all last season. Heck, it only happened five times in 2023.

There are plenty of mitigating circumstances. Last week’s game in Green Bay was played in real feel temperatures that dropped into the teens. Sunday’s win over the Lions featured a steady wind with wild gusts above 30 miles per hour. In both games, the Eagles lost All-Pro right tackle Lane Johnson to an injury (most recently, his foot, which sidelined him for all of the second half Sunday night).

The schedule has been brutal. The Lions defense entered Sunday ranked seventh in the NFL in yards per play allowed. The Eagles had already faced three of the six teams who ranked above Detroit (Denver Broncos, Green Bay Packers, Los Angeles Rams).

“We want to be better than what we were tonight, but every game’s played a little bit differently,” coach Nick Sirianni said. “Every game is played to win, but do we have to clean up things on offense? Of course we do. As good as the defense played, we’re going to have to clean up things on defense. As good as the special teams played, we’re going to have to clean up things on special teams. But on offense, there’s some shooting ourselves in the foot that’s happening and some of those things are things that, we always talk about [things that] take no talent, and we have such good talent that we have to be able to master the things that take no talent so our talent can shine.”

Give them credit for trying something new. They tried to force the ball to Brown, which is something that he and plenty of Eagles fans have been lobbying for in recent weeks. His 11 targets were more than he had in the last two games combined, including last week’s three-target, two-catch nothingburger in Green Bay.

The concerning thing is that nothing else changed. Brown’s seven catches went for just 49 yards. The Eagles scored just one touchdown. Even on a night when Jared Goff was out of sync and the Lions went 0-for-5 on fourth down, Detroit’s offense looked like the more highly evolved unit. The pinnacle came in the second quarter, when Goff hit Amon-Ra St. Brown for 34 yards and then Jameson Williams for a 40-yard touchdown. The 74 yards the Lions gained on two plays were more than the Eagles had gained all game to that point.

There were plenty of stretches last season when the Eagles looked like that sort of offense. Brown was always at the center of it, it seemed.

The Eagles need to find a way to make Sunday night a building block. Good things happen when you target even a diminished Brown. The final example came with 1:47 left, with the Eagles one play away from turning the ball back over to the Lions for a chance at a wholly unearned game-tying touchdown drive. On third-and-8 from the Eagles 37, Jalen Hurts forced a pass to a tightly covered Brown, and Lions cornerback Rock Ya-Sin panicked. Instead of watching Hurts’ pass sail wide of its mark and short of the sticks, he reached out toward Brown and drew a flag. It was a questionable call, but the end result gave the Eagles a first down, and kept the Lions offense on the sidelines for the rest of the game.

“We’re always trying to get A.J. involved,” Sirianni said. “Always, always, always, always. The game play is played differently each and every week of what happens. I don’t think I’ve been shy about saying this. The game plan’s always going to start in the passing game with him and [WR] DeVonta [Smith] and [TE] Dallas [Goedert], and so we’re always trying to do that and get him the football. That’s the way the game played out a little bit today.”

At some point, it will need to play out better. Let’s hope that point comes soon.

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