Eagles vs. 49ers NFC title game recap (2024)

The NFL playoffs resumed Sunday with the Eagles routing the 49ers 31-7 in the NFC Championship Game. Philadelphia advances to Super Bowl LVII where it will face the Chiefs, who beat the Bengals in the AFC Championship Game.

Check in with The Athletic for all the latest NFL news, highlights, reaction and analysis.

Helpful links

• Final stats and boxscore (Eagles def. 49ers 31-7)
• Complete NFL postseason scores and schedule
• Season-long coverage of the 49ers and Eagles

--

Subscribe to DAZN and watch every second of the NFL season, when and where you want it (Canada only).

The Athletic may receive an affiliate commission if you open an account with DAZN through links contained in the above content.

--

(Photo: Getty Images)

Underneath a plume of cigar smoke, about an hour after the Philadelphia Eagles’ 31-7 NFC Championship victory, Jason Kelce addressed the possibility of playing against his brother Travis in Super Bowl LVII.

“I got a Kansas City sweatshirt that I’m gonna wear for the next three hours and then that’s it for the end of the year,” Kelce said. “Win or lose, I’m done being a Chiefs fan in three hours.

“For the people that are on board with the NFL being scripted, it’s pretty good evidence maybe.”

For the second time in six seasons, the Eagles are heading to the Super Bowl. This time, they do so not as plucky underdogs but as a dominant group that won 16 of 17 games started by Jalen Hurts, only five of those decided by seven points or fewer. For much of the season, they have been the best team in football. Now they’ll have one more chance to prove it.

If, as Kelce suggests, this Eagles season was written in the stars, it’s hard to figure out the author.

Read more here.

In 2015, the last time the Super Bowl landed in Arizona, something unexpected happened. It wasn’t just the Patriots’ last-second interception at the goal line to preserve the victory or the Seahawks’ confounding decision not to feed Marshawn Lynch the ball in the fading moments. What fans and the business of football also remember is ticket prices skyrocketed, and brokers who had assumed they would fall couldn’t, in many cases, deliver the tickets and went out of business.

The terrain for Super Bowl tickets heading into next month’s return to Glendale is entirely different and far pricier than when the NFL descended on the city eight years ago.

The ticket fiasco led to a concerted effort by the NFL to control more tickets and how they are distributed, leading to large price jumps. Before 2015, the cheapest Super Bowl ticket prices generally were a few thousand dollars (the lone exception was the 2011 contest between the Packers and Steelers, a glamor pairing). But go back to the 2008 title game in Arizona and get-in prices were less than $1,000 on game day.

“That was sort of like the B.C. and A.D. of the ticket market,” said Jesse Lawrence, CEO of ticket platform TicketIQ, on the demarcation point the 2015 Super Bowl represented. “There was a time prior to 2015 when you could buy a ticket for $1,000 the day of the game for some Super Bowls. The new world we live in is this is a product that costs between $5,000 and, you know, maybe it starts off as five on an average demand opponent or matchup, and I think it goes up from there.”

Read more here.

The 49ers’ sadness didn’t end with their 31-7 loss to the Eagles, lowlighted by two more quarterback injuries in a season that saw a parade of them. It carried over into the postgame locker room, where linebacker Fred Warner sat nearly motionless at his stall for several minutes.

Some teammates who passed by Warner’s spot stopped to give him a pat on the back and share words of encouragement. The linebacker finally rose to his feet after a few minutes and moved toward 49ers safety Talanoa Hufanga, who was in tears in the middle of the room. Those two shared a long embrace.

Earlier, Warner had run into 49ers defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans, who’s in the interviewing process to potentially become an NFL head coach. There seems to be a good chance that Ryans, who’s been on the 49ers’ staff since 2017 — the season before Warner was drafted — won’t be with the team anymore next season.

“I hadn’t thought about it up to this point,” Warner said. “Obviously, you think you’re going to win it all. But seeing him was emotional. It was the first time it kind of hit me that this was the last one with him. We came into this thing together. I owe everything to him. He’s the reason I’m the player I am today. He’s fully deserving to go on and be a head coach.

“It hit hard (Sunday), for sure.”

Read more here.

PHILADELPHIA — One image in the second quarter Sunday told a season-long story: On the 49ers’ sideline was Brock Purdy, his right elbow tucked against his stomach and protected by a black brace, and next to him was Trey Lance, his right foot in a plastic boot. A few feet away, Jimmy Garoppolo, still recovering from a broken foot, watched the action in a black warmup suit with a red stocking cap on his head.

The scene captured a year that was dominated by quarterback injuries, beginning with Garoppolo’s offseason-long recovery from shoulder surgery and ending — with a thud — with Purdy’s elbow injury, which occurred on the 49ers’ opening series when Eagles defensive end Haason Reddick slammed into the quarterback before he released the ball. At the time, Purdy thought the resulting play was an incompletion and that the 49ers would have a chance on third down. But he also immediately knew something was wrong and walked up to Kyle Shanahan.

“If we run a play, we can’t throw it deep,” he told his coach.

The 49ers gave no diagnosis after the game — Purdy will have an MRI on Monday — but ESPN reported he injured his ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow. If it’s ruptured, that could mean surgery and a months-long recovery. If it isn’t, his rehabilitation would last roughly six weeks and Purdy would be ready for the start of the team’s offseason program.

After the game, Purdy reported that the elbow was “extremely painful” and that there was swelling in his forearm near the joint. He said couldn’t throw the ball much more than 5 yards.

Read more here.

(Photo: USA Today)

Talanoa Hufanga stood about 10 feet from his locker, the sleeveless white t-shirt he wore under his pads draping over his gold game pants. His arms hung crossed behind his back, his hands clasped together. His face pointed towards the floor as he gently rocked. Left. Right. Left. Right. Like a pendulum, tapping his foot with each sway. The pacing in place seemed to harness his swirling emotions, like he wanted to feel the hurt coursing through him but also needed to control it.

Shirtless defensive lineman Arik Armstead came over to put his arm around Hufanga’s neck and speak some words into his spirit. Before long, linebacker Fred Warner, still in pads and a grass-stained jersey, made his way to the second-year safety. His embrace also came with words of encouragement. After each hug, after both moments of consolation, Hufanga used his t-shirt to wipe away his tears. Then he returned his arms behind his back and resumed rocking. Left. Right. Left. Right. His head bowed, his lips moving as he whispered to himself.

“I truly appreciate these moments,” Hufanga said. “They’re tough moments, though.”

Hufanga is now initiated. He’s fully in the fellowship of heartbreak after the 49ers’ 31-7 loss to the Eagles in Sunday’s NFC Championship Game.

Read more here.

Super Bowl LVII is set. It will be the Kansas City Chiefs facing the Philadelphia Eagles in a matchup of the NFC and AFC’s top seeds.

Punching their ticket ended up being a much more challenging feat for the Chiefs than it was for the Eagles earlier in the day. The Chiefs had to exorcise some demons against the Bengals, the team that rallied back to stun them in last year’s AFC Championship Game and had beaten them three straight times over the past two seasons.

We asked The Athletic’s Tim Graham, Jeff Howe and Dan Pompei to weigh in on some of the biggest storylines from Sunday’s NFC and AFC Championship games.

The scent of victory cigars greeted anyone who stepped into the Philadelphia Eagles’ locker room. Players celebrated in NFC Championship T-shirts. Scavengers of confetti remained on their home field, remnants of the trophy presentation following the Eagles’ 31-7 win over the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday to clinch a bid to Super Bowl LVII.

In that same locker room three weeks earlier, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie shared a story during a victory speech. Days before the season commenced, he called Nick Sirianni and the coaches into his office. He expressed that the Eagles only had one goal in the regular season: earn the No. 1 seed.

“That’s the big advantage,” Lurie explained.

It was that advantage that gave the Eagles an opening-round bye and a path to the Super Bowl that included quarterbacks Daniel Jones and Brock Purdy, and no need to board an airplane until after hoisting the NFC Championship trophy. They’ll play against the Kansas City Chiefs — the other No. 1 seed — and coach Andy Reid, who has the most wins in Eagles history.

Sunday’s victory continued a season full of dominant performances. This one included rushing for four scores against the NFL’s best defense and limiting the undermanned 49ers offense to one touchdown — all in front of a home crowd that turned Lincoln Financial Field (and the city’s streets) into a party to celebrate the franchise’s fourth Super Bowl appearance.

Read more here.

Kyle Shanahan and his players looked like they might’ve aged four eons in four quarters on Sunday, when, finally, the 49ers’ Season of Four Quarterbacks came to a merciless and miserable end.

This was too much to bear, at least for one day. This was just an emotional overload — at least one executive was unabashedly wiping away tears in the locker room, quietly nodding with respect at his players.

The 49ers were angry at the outcome and the circ*mstances. They were proud of fighting through this game, even though they were essentially without a quarterback for most of the second half. They were frustrated that it came down to this. And they were grieving the end of something truly special — a team that overcame season-ending injuries to their top two QBs and still gave themselves a real chance to win a championship.

Until Sunday, when both Brock Purdy and backup Josh Johnson, their third and fourth QBs, suffered debilitating injuries, which changed this NFC Championship Game from a titanic matchup against the Eagles into a 49ers elimination march. You can deal with losing two QBs in a season? OK, how about losing two more in the conference championship game? Impossible. Frustratingly, furiously impossible.

The 49ers couldn’t throw. They couldn’t run against an Eagles defense that knew they couldn’t throw. There was no way out. There was nothing they could do. There was great expectation leading into this game. And then there was … only loss.

Read more here.

One image in the second quarter Sunday told a season-long story: On the 49ers’ sideline was Brock Purdy, his right elbow tucked against his stomach and protected by a black brace, and next to him was Trey Lance, his right foot in a plastic boot. A few feet away, Jimmy Garoppolo, still recovering from a broken foot, watched the action in a black warmup suit with a red stocking cap on his head.

The scene captured a year that was dominated by quarterback injuries, beginning with Garoppolo’s offseason-long recovery from shoulder surgery and ending — with a thud — with Purdy’s elbow injury, which occurred on the 49ers’ opening series when Eagles defensive end Haason Reddick slammed into the quarterback before he released the ball. At the time, Purdy thought the resulting play was an incompletion and that the 49ers would have a chance on third down. But he also immediately knew something was wrong and walked up to Kyle Shanahan.

“If we run a play, we can’t throw it deep,” he told his coach.

The 49ers gave no diagnosis after the game — Purdy will have an MRI on Monday — but ESPN reported he injured his ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow. If it’s ruptured, that could mean surgery and a months-long recovery. If it isn’t, his rehabilitation would last roughly six weeks and Purdy would be ready for the start of the team’s offseason program.

After the game, Purdy reported that the elbow was “extremely painful” and that there was swelling in his forearm near the joint. He said couldn’t throw the ball much more than five yards.

Read more here.

(Photo: USA Today)

The Philadelphia Eagles are small favorites in Super Bowl LVII against the Kansas City Chiefs. The odds opened at Eagles favored by 1 point shortly after the Chiefs beat the Bengals in the AFC Championship and has since moved to 2.5 points. The over/under is set at 49.5 points.

The Super Bowl kicks off at 6:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, Feb. 12 from State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.

The Philadelphia Eagles advanced to Super Bowl LVII by toppling the San Francisco 49ers 31-7 in Sunday’s NFC Championship Game at Lincoln Financial Field. Here’s what you need to know:

• The Eagles, moving on to their fourth Super Bowl, will face the winner of the Chiefs–Bengals AFC Championship Game. They won their lone Super Bowl championship in the franchise’s last trip during the 2017 season by beating the Patriots in Super Bowl LII.
• Niners quarterback Brock Purdy left in the first quarter with a right elbow injury on a sack-fumble by the Eagles’ Haason Reddick. Josh Johnson took over but left in the third quarter, entering concussion protocol to force Purdy back in the game.
• Philadelphia literally ran through San Francisco for four rushing touchdowns: Miles Sanders scored the first two first-half touchdowns, Boston Scott added a third TD with less than 20 seconds left in the first half and Jalen Hurts pushed in a QB sneak late in the third quarter.
• Tempers flared late in the fourth quarter with a sizable brawl between members of both teams in the middle of the field. The 49ers’ Trent Williams and the Eagles’ K’Von Wallace were ejected.

Read more here.

With a 31-point win over the Giants in the divisional round and a 24-point win over the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game, the Eagles have recorded two of their three most-lopsided playoff victories in franchise history on their way to the Super Bowl.

The 2017 Eagles, who won the Super Bowl, also had a 31-point win the playoffs, beating the Vikings by that margin in the NFC Championship Game.

My ultimate takeaway is a question sensible in hindsight: Would 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan have paid more attention to Haason Reddick in the pregame protection plan? If he were to review the 49ers' offensive approach, was that something he'd change? The question goes back to the first quarter.

The 49ers chose to have quarterback Brock Purdy, and Reddick raced from the edge of the line of scrimmage — past a tight end — to force a turnover. The Eagles didn't score then, but the defensive line wreaked havoc on the following position, and the 49ers fought uphill after that. Was it a lack of execution, blocking the Eagles' front? Would Shanahan have done something differently? These are certainly the thoughts 49ers fans will ponder after another highly-successful season that will end without a ring.