First things first: Congratulations to the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks for advancing to this year’s Super Bowl.
I watched the 2026 AFC Championship game between the Broncos and the Patriots with particular interest, expecting the same miracle I witnessed in 2018. The Denver Broncos, led all season by rookie quarterback Bo Nix, were one game from the Super Bowl. Sadly, Nix went down with an injury late in Broncos’ overtime win against the Bills in the divisional round. With Nix out for the remainder of the playoffs, Jarrett Stidham stepped into the kind of moment that creates legends. For a brief stretch, the journeyman, this forgotten backup, almost channeled 2018 Nick Foles to beat the Patriots.
But it wasn’t meant to be. Stidham showed flashes but couldn’t summon the magic. The Patriots advanced, as dynasties often do when facing teams not quite ready for their moment.
Broncos missed the opportunity to make history. In 2018, the Philadelphia Eagles found themselves in a similar position to make history, and they did. What made the 2018 Eagles Super Bowl run so transcendent wasn’t just that the backup quarterback won. It was how the Eagles won, and more importantly, why they were capable of winning when logic suggested they shouldn’t.
Seven years have now passed since Super Bowl LII. I watched my Philadelphia Eagles exit the 2026 playoffs with a dispiriting Wild Card loss to the San Francisco 49ers, the kind of defeat that feels less like bad luck than organizational drift. Sitting there in the stadium as the game slipped away, my mind kept returning to that improbable 2018 Super Bowl run, when Nick Foles and his band of supposed misfits beat Tom Brady’s Patriots because they had cracked a code that eludes most teams: how to be both chosen and hungry, brilliant and humble, individual and collective, all at once.
Those Eagles weren’t just lucky. They operationalized a paradox that defines truly exceptional achievement. Stidham couldn’t do it in Denver because you can’t manufacture this formula on demand. It requires institutional commitment, cultural architecture, and that rare alignment of belief and preparation that produces magic.
The Chosen Underdog
When Carson Wentz suffered a season-ending ACL tear in Week 14 of 2017, Las Vegas gave the Eagles 5-to-1 odds to win the Super Bowl. The narrative was set: a feel-good story destined for heartbreak. But inside the building, Doug Pederson’s team operated from a different text entirely. They believed. Genuinely, almost mystically that they were meant to win.
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This kind of conviction isn’t delusion, it’s something closer to what the ancient Greeks called thumos, that spirited part of the soul that drives excellence and refuses subordination. When Philadelphia Eagles legend and game commentator Mike Quick describes that season now, he uses the language of inevitability. “We knew,” he told me. “There was never fear after Carson went down because the team was destined.”
This inner certainty permits audacity, like Pederson’s decision to call “Philly Special,” putting his backup quarterback in position to catch a touchdown pass on fourth down in the Super Bowl. You cannot call that play unless you believe you are meant to win.
But, despite believing they were destined, they never stopped acting hungry because they also believed they were underdogs. They wore plastic dog masks in practice, not as ironic branding, but as daily reminders of their designated role. Underdogs hunt. Underdogs scrap. Underdogs never rest in assumptions of superiority. While the Patriots represented the pinnacle of sustained excellence, five championships in 16 years, the Eagles represented something equally powerful: the insurgent energy of those who must prove themselves worthy of their own convictions.
The Knowledge Cult
What separated those Eagles from countless other teams that “believed” but fell short? Their almost monastic devotion to preparation and innovation. Pederson and his staff didn’t just game-plan, they reconstructed offensive philosophy weekly, sometimes daily.
The Eagles’ offensive success rate on first down was 58% in that playoff run, well above the league average of 48%. Their use of pre-snap motion increased by 23% in the playoffs compared to the regular season. Against the Vikings in the NFC Championship, they exploited a specific coverage tendency Minnesota had shown in only 14% of their previous games. That kind of preparation requires hundreds of hours of study, not just by coaches but by players willing to become scholars of their craft.
Foles himself embodied this commitment. After considering retirement two years earlier, he spent 2017 as Wentz’s backup studying not just opponents but the underlying mathematics and psychology of quarterback play. He was perfecting mental processing under pressure on the sidelines. When his moment came, he wasn’t winging it; he was implementing a rigorously tested hypothesis about his own capabilities.
This knowledge-worship appears consistently in sustained excellence. The San Antonio Spurs under Gregg Popovich weren’t just well-coached; they were a basketball laboratory, testing new defensive schemes years before the rest of the league caught on.
Amazon’s 2026 market dominance, now valued at $2.1 trillion, stems not from Jeff Bezos’ initial vision but from the company’s pathological commitment to data analysis. They run thousands of A/B tests simultaneously, treating business decisions like scientific hypotheses.
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Singapore’s transformation from developing nation to global powerhouse between 1965 and 2025 follows the same pattern. Lee Kuan Yew systematically studied what worked elsewhere, Dutch water management, Swiss banking regulation, Japanese industrial policy, and ruthlessly adapted to local conditions. The city-state now boasts a per capita GDP of $88,000 and ranks first globally in educational outcomes.
The Pack Mentality
But knowledge alone produces academics, not champions. The fourth element was radical commitment to collective identity over individual glory.
Throughout that 2017 season, the Eagles operated with unusual personnel flexibility. Pederson rotated defensive linemen in waves, sometimes eight or nine players sharing four positions. The team’s leading wide receiver, Alshon Jeffery, had only 789 yards. No running back topped 800 yards. In an era increasingly defined by individual player brands, the Eagles built something counter-cultural: a team where individual excellence mattered only insofar as it elevated collective performance.
The dog mask ritual reinforced this daily. When everyone wears the same mask, hierarchy temporarily dissolves. The Pro Bowler and the practice squad player become indistinguishable. This psychological leveling created “psychological safety,” a condition where individual players felt secure enough to take risks without fear of humiliation. It’s the single strongest predictor of team performance, stronger than individual talent or resources.
The Manhattan Project succeeded not because it assembled the smartest physicists, though it did, but because Oppenheimer created an environment where ideas flowed freely across traditional hierarchical boundaries. Boston’s emergence as America’s leading biotech hub, now home to over 1,200 life sciences companies employing 89,000 workers as of 2025, came from decades of institutional collaboration between Harvard Medical School, MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, and venture capital firms willing to share knowledge across organizational boundaries. The region’s academic institutions spend $3.2 billion annually on life sciences research, creating a common pool of innovation no single institution could generate alone.
The Paradox Operationalized
What makes the Eagles’ championship relevant beyond sports nostalgia is how they operationalized seemingly contradictory impulses. How do you maintain underdog hunger while believing in your destiny? How do you pursue innovation while trusting your preparation? How do you subordinate individual glory while demanding individual excellence?
You do it through “dialectical thinking,” the ability to hold opposed ideas in productive tension rather than resolving them into simple binaries. The Eagles didn’t choose between confidence and humility; they needed both simultaneously. They didn’t choose between individual development and team sacrifice; they made individual excellence the price of admission to collective achievement.
This dialectical approach appears in every sustained dynasty. The New Zealand All Blacks rugby team, which has maintained a 77% win rate over 120 years, operates on a principle they call “sweep the sheds.” Even superstar players clean the locker room after matches. The ritual simultaneously honors the team’s special status while reinforcing humility. The tradition survives because it refuses to resolve the paradox.
Renaissance Florence exhibited the same pattern. The city’s artistic flowering between 1400 and 1550 came from families who believed Florence was specially chosen by God while simultaneously competing ferociously for commissions. The Medici patronage system worked because it channeled both impulses: artists gained security (chosen for greatness) but faced constant pressure to innovate (underdog hunger). The result was Michelangelo, Leonardo, Machiavelli, and Galileo.
Fragility
But here’s what makes this model difficult: it’s inherently unstable. The very tensions that produce excellence risk collapse when any element falls out of balance. The Eagles themselves couldn’t sustain it. They missed the playoffs in 2020, fired Pederson, and have not recaptured that 2017 magic since.
Watching this year’s Wild Card loss, I could see the absence of all four elements. The belief seemed hollow, more hope than conviction. The preparation was adequate but not obsessive. The 49ers repeatedly exploited the same defensive vulnerabilities. The team fractured under pressure into individual survival modes. The hunger was gone, replaced by the comfortable assumption that talent alone would suffice.
The deeper issue is cultural entropy. Maintaining dialectical tension requires constant energy. It’s far easier to resolve the paradox, to become either arrogant champions resting on laurels or permanent underdogs who don’t actually believe they deserve to win. Most organizations drift toward one pole or the other.
The Patriots’ dynasty lasted longer (2001-2019) because Bill Belichick institutionalized the paradox into the operating system. Every season began with the same mantra: “Ignore the noise.” Championships were acknowledged briefly, then discarded. Past success granted no exemptions from competition. When it finally ended, it wasn’t because the culture failed but because the quarterback left.
The lesson: sustainable excellence requires more than episodic inspiration. It demands institutional architecture that makes the paradox structural rather than motivational.
Google’s “Objectives and Key Results” system attempts this by requiring teams to set goals where 70% achievement is considered success, aggressive enough to stretch capabilities (underdog) but realistic enough to maintain morale (chosen).
Amazon’s “Leadership Principles” explicitly include both “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit” and “Deliver Results,” making productive tension a formal expectation.
Philadelphia
There’s something fitting about these lessons emerging from Philadelphia specifically. This city has always embodied useful contradictions. Founded on Enlightenment ideals (chosen), it has maintained a working-class chip-on-its-shoulder identity (underdog). It’s a city of libraries and universities (knowledge cult) that also perfected the team-sport culture of neighborhood loyalty (pack mentality).
As Philadelphia celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, these tensions feel particularly relevant. The city ranks sixth nationally in poverty rates (23.1% as of 2024), yet simultaneously hosts a thriving innovation economy with over 120 biotech companies. It’s a city that believes it should be great while constantly feeling overlooked by coastal elites. Whether Philadelphia can translate that energy into sustained civic excellence, the way those 2017 Eagles did, remains an open question.
But the formula is there, proven on the field and validated by history. Believe you are meant for greatness. Work like you have everything to prove. Study relentlessly. Hunt in packs. Hold all four in permanent tension, refusing the comfortable resolution.
Last word
For individuals, the application is both simple and hard. Simple because you control your own psychology: you can choose to believe in your special purpose while working with underdog intensity. Harder because maintaining that balance without external structure requires exceptional self-awareness.
The dog masks were absurd. They were also profound. Sometimes the deepest truths require ritual to make them real, to transform abstract principles into daily practice. Those Eagles wore their masks, did their work, and won their championship. Then they took the masks off, and we were left with the lesson.
So now that you know the formula, do you have the discipline to implement it, humility to maintain it, and wisdom to recognize when you’ve stopped?