Cory's Reads #50: Power to the Player
Great, it's one of those football newsletters again...
The 2025 NFL trade deadline passed us by, and A.J. Brown remains a Philadelphia Eagle.
It comes as little surprise to most fans of the reigning Super Bowl champs, whose aspirations of a repeat surely cannot be realized without the help of Brown, one of the NFL’s premier WRs.
Of course, Brown has not been that much of a help over 12 weeks into the season, at least not if the stat sheet is any indication. The seven-year pro has 38 catches for 567 yards and 4 touchdowns. For a player who is often considered among the best 6-8 players at his position, none of those statistics rank among the top 45 in their respective categories. However, it’s safe to say that Brown does not deserve the brunt of the blame for his struggles this season. The Philadelphia offense has struggled on the whole throughout 2025, ranking in the bottom half of the league in both passing and rushing production despite little to no roster turnover from the team’s 2024 season, which culminated in the second Super Bowl victory in franchise history.
Last year’s happy ending may cloud our memories, but it is worth recalling that 2024 was not all sunshine and roses for the Eagles offense either. Still, Saquon Barkley put together a historic rushing season, providing offensive coordinator Kellen Moore with a reliable floor as the team’s play caller. Besides, Moore still orchestrated a competent, if inconsistent, passing offense. A.J. Brown ended the season with over 1000 receiving yards, and Jalen Hurts threw for just 5 interceptions, one year after throwing 15.
Moore is now the head coach in New Orleans, and the team’s new OC Kevin Patullo has struggled to unlock either facet of his offense in the same way. The major dip in production has understandably frustrated Brown, around whom trade rumors began to swirl in recent weeks. It’s a surprisingly tense set of circumstances for a team that sits atop the NFC at 8-3, but Brown continues to fan the flames with cryptic social media posts and not-so-cryptic rants on a stream with Twitch personality JankyRondo.
Perhaps the weekly drama surrounding Brown and his role in the anemic Eagles offense does portend an abrupt end to his time in Philly this offseason, but he will at least be an Eagle for the remainder of 2025, competing for a second Super Bowl ring in as many seasons. Still, a player of his caliber is justified in demanding more involvement with the offense. Head coach Nick Sirianni may argue that Brown is involved with the gameplan and that Hurts is simply making a different read (likely to his other star WR Devonta Smith, who is on pace for career-highs across every major category), but it is a massive indictment of both Sirianni and Patullo if their gameplan does not allow for consistent and easy ways to get the ball to A.J. Brown. With the running game in similar disarray, there are no easy buttons for this offense right now, an alarming reality for a team that will have to outscore some of the league’s most prolific offenses if it hopes to compete in Super Bowl LX in February.
After the confetti had fallen and the afterglow of last year’s Super Bowl win wore off, Brown shared a vulnerable and astute observation with his Instagram followers.
The caption reads:
After a few days , I’ve had time to reflect on being a champion.
I tried to feel how everyone made it seem to be a champion and unfortunately it was short lived.. two days to be exact lol.
I’ve never been a champion at the highest level before but I thought my hard work would be justified by winning it all. It wasn’t. My thrill for this game comes when i dominate. It’s the Hunt that does it for me. It’s when the Db drops his head and surrender because he can’t F with me . The Intense battles. Early mornings. Late nights. Sacrifices. I love putting smiles on peoples faces, don’t get me wrong but it just wasn’t what I thought it would be. It’s the journey that I love the most. BACK 2 Work!
By all accounts, Brown is a hard worker and an excellent teammate. I am sure he is just as driven as every other player on the Eagles roster to call himself a back-to-back champion. And yet, there is no shame in his admission that he’d also like to rack up impressive numbers, and cement himself as one of the greats at his position, especially with a Super Bowl ring already wrapped around his finger. As an Eagles fan, I would be disappointed to lose a player like A.J. Brown, but if this team is no longer capable of unleashing his game-breaking talent, I support Brown’s right to jump ship.
Sure, the grass is always greener. Ja’Marr Chase is putting together another monstrous season in Cincinnati, yet the Bengals are 3-8 and poised to miss the playoffs for the third straight season. Perhaps Chase and Brown would enjoy a role swap, or perhaps both would find that success in the NFL comes in many shapes and sizes, and requires sacrifice one way or another.
But I have my own frustrations to vent as it relates to this current iteration of my favorite football team. The 2025-26 version of the Philadelphia Eagles is a boring team to watch, and I am left contemplating my own relationship to the fervent sports fandom that almost anyone born in the Greater Philadelphia area can understand. We are in uncharted territory as a fanbase. For only the second time in franchise history, the Eagles are the defending Super Bowl champs. A franchise long defined by its lack of a Super Bowl trophy is now among the NFL’s elite, regularly competing for pole positioning within their conference and therefore the league at large. The prospect of winning back-to-back championships is exciting, but it is a strange mindset to know that anything less than a Super Bowl victory will feel like an abject failure. We are living in the golden era of Philadelphia Eagles football, and yet the experience seems to be ringing hollow relative to the emotional highs and lows of the previous few decades.
Perhaps our shared disappointment could be softened by sheer entertainment value, but the Eagles offer very little in the way of gridiron pleasure these days. Of course, discussing sports in terms of “entertainment” and “pleasure” can be a bit precarious, nearly wreaking of entitlement. Do we as fans deserve a particular quality of play, or must we defer to the players and coaches on all matters of performance?
It is a complex question which I do not intend to oversimplify when I interrogate the role of the spectator in spectator sports. But surely any of us can recognize that we are lucky not to have to fulfill the responsibilities of our jobs in front of global audiences on a weekly basis. We do not have to disagree with our bosses or make mistakes in a public forum, and we certainly do not have to hand over ownership of those experiences to relative strangers. Professional athletes do, and so the least we can afford a player like A.J. Brown is the agency to carve out his own legacy on his own terms. After all, football is the closest thing we have to a bloodsport in our culture. We watch as players put their bodies on the line week in and week out, and for what? Our entertainment, sure, but more precisely…money, glory, passion, purpose. Those are motivating factors that most NFL fans could never fully comprehend, even if our investment — financial, emotional, etc. — is what simultaneously drives them.
Therein lies the precarious nature of the relationship between fan and player, made especially fraught by the increasingly complicated infrastructure sprouting up around our sporting environment, characterized by the simultaneous rise of sports betting and player podcasting…an awkward combination indeed.
Once Jason and Travis Kelce established their podcast New Heights as one of the biggest properties in sports entertainment, almost every player across every sport convinced themselves that they were worthy of a podcast too, even if they weren’t among the greatest to ever play their position, or oozing with charisma alongside their equally successful sibling. But even the most bland of these shows engender an unprecedented intimacy between athletes and their listeners, falsely permitting perhaps an even more pernicious parasocial bond than those formed elsewhere in the pop culture landscape.
What makes these relationships with professional athletes even more toxic is their coexistence alongside sports betting as an increasingly popular means of engaging with the game. I am not convinced we deserve such immediate access to the same athletes who might lose us $100 in the blink of an eye, nor that those athletes should be allowed to advertise the sportsbooks from which they are otherwise meant to be separated. Media outlets like ESPN and Barstool operate their own sportsbooks, running advertisements for them while they report on gambling scandals in the NBA or MLB.
Those scandals are a healthy reminder of the obligations that players do undoubtedly have to those around them — fans, teammates, and owners alike. Whether it be in the interest of competitive balance or an intangible notion of integrity, professional athletes owe it to themselves and others not to partake in sports gambling, even if the allure is dictated by broader trends in sports entertainment. Each major league has had to contend with their own players participating in America’s new favorite pastime, and each league has succeeded in offloading the burden of responsibility onto those players, rather than the leadership flaunting these new profit streams at every turn. That is not to excuse the selfishness nor the stupidity of Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz of the MLB, or Chauncey Billups and Terry Rozier of the NBA. But these men are simply the latest in a long line of professional athletes to exploit the sports industrial complex’s new obsession with online gambling. While the sins of these athletes reach varying degrees of malintent, I can recognize in all of them an honest reaction to an industry overtaken by corporate greed. Newcomers like FanDuel and DraftKings have transformed sports forever, and opportunists from every corner of the industry have taken advantage…why shouldn’t players and coaches do the same?
Well, there are several good reasons as to why those directly involved with the outcome of a game should not be benefiting financially from it, but the impulse to do so anyway is an understandable one. While Clase and Billups and their contemporaries will deservedly pay for their crimes, I think it is fair to say the real onus rests elsewhere. Leagues and the outlets that cover them have embraced sports betting wholeheartedly, and their complete amnesty amidst our broader social reckoning with it strikes me as a threat to sporting culture as a whole. If we cannot permit A.J. Brown his legitimate gripes about the Eagles’ on-field play, nor can we recognize the financial restraints players such as his former teammate Isaiah Rodgers face when punished for their participation in a system the league otherwise flaunts at every turn, perhaps football really has been reduced to a gladiator sport, humanity sacrificed for the sake of profit.
Of course, it may be tougher to identify those areas of contemporary America where humanity is not being sacrificed for the sake of profit. It is fitting I write this as Edgar Wright’s The Running Man remake hits theaters, not too long after Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk adapted another Stephen King novel treading similar territory. Netflix also just released the second season of Squid Game: The Challenge, a thrilling show that I quite enjoy, even as its very existence leaves a piss-poor taste in my mouth.
Cory's Reads #33: The Brand of Brutality
Two years ago, Survivor kicked off its 41st season, and with it came an entirely new era for the long-running reality series.
Watching people do things for money is as American as pie — happy Thanksgiving, by the way — but arguably even more American is limiting the agency of those people in their pursuit of all that cash. Both of this year’s King adaptations explored that idea to only middling success, but the point still stands: capitalism is a spectator sport, and very few of us are the spectators.
We are all participants, closer to being included in those sick games than profiting off of them, no matter how many same-game parlays we might place.
Whether this is your first time following along with my rants, or you have been here since the beginning, thank you for supporting 50 iterations of this ever-evolving newsletter. In lieu of a Letterboxd review, please enjoy this trip down memory lane as I highlight a few of my favorite newsletters from the past several years:
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