Eagles' Jordan Mailata says this isn't 2023 again

Plenty have compared the 2025 Eagles to the 2023 team that collapsed but Jordan Mailata doesn't feel it.

By Dave Zangaro • Published December 3, 2025

It’s hard to avoid the comparison.

There are plenty of similarities between this Eagles season and the 2023 season that have made fans start to compare the two teams. Like the 2023 team, these Eagles won a lot of games early but had obvious flaws, and one side of the football has really underperformed in both years.

NBC Sports Philadelphia’s Reuben Frank took a deeper look at some of those similarities this week.

The fear here is that the 2025 Eagles end up collapsing like that 2023 team, which lost 5 of 6 to finish the regular season before a first-round playoff exit.

But at least one player isn’t buying the comparison.

"I’ll tell you right now: This is nowhere near close to 2023,” left tackle Jordan Mailata said on 94WIP on Monday night. "Let’s nip that in the bud right there. At least, as a player in the locker room that was part of the 2023 team and part of this team. It’s nowhere near. Nowhere near.”

Why does Mailata feel that way?

"I’m telling you now,” Mailata said. "The way we go about our practice, the detail. Although we’re not winning games. I shouldn’t even say that. We’ve won eight games. I shouldn’t even say that. I think the way we attack every day with the attention to detail. I would probably say the detail right now is our in-game execution. That is lacking. Now, we can go back to practice and that will probably be a big emphasis of putting ourselves in these situations where they keep hurting us in games. That’s all you can do. I feel like that wasn’t there in ’23. It’s there this year. The coaching technique, it’s there this year. It wasn’t there in ’23. 

"So I just want to dead it, if you know where that came from. I want to dead it right then and there. Maybe as a fan. But I can tell you now, as a player, this is completely different from 2023. I don’t even want to go there. I kind of said that earlier in the year. Week 1, Week 2 or Week 3? I said it during the year and I was like, ‘What an idiot.’ I don’t even know why I said that. It’s not even true. Because even the way we go about practice. Padded practices, no walkthrough Wednesdays. The only walkthrough Wednesdays we’ve had are during the short weeks. And that’s all we had. 

"I love the way we attack every day now. It’s just completely different to 2023. At least as a player, that’s my experience. But maybe I need to see it as a fan to relate. As a player, it doesn’t feel the same.”

While there seem to be plenty of similarities between the 2023 team and the 2025 team, there are plenty of differences too. One of the biggest ones is probably that the Eagles were coming off a Super Bowl loss in 2023 and are coming off a Super Bowl win in 2025.

And, obviously, the defense was the bigger problem in 2023, while the offense is the bigger problem in 2025. So do you have more faith in the Eagles’ offense getting fixed this year than the defense in 2023?

During his Monday press conference this week, head coach Nick Sirianni was asked if there are lessons he can take from the 2023 season to apply to this year.

"Yeah, I think you saw a lot of that the lessons we learned in ‘23 resulted in what happened last year,” Sirianni said. "So of course, you always take lessons in everything of win, lose or draw. You're always constantly trying to learn and get better. Sometimes that sting of the loss, or like you said, the 2023 season, has even more impact, which is why I'm grateful for adversity and looking for an opportunity to get better from the adversity. 

"I think that most definitely those have lasting lessons, won't be specific about it. I have very specific thoughts and [have] written down exactly what we learned and how we learned it and what we did for that. Obviously, those lumps that you take, if you allow them to, can knock you down and keep you down, or those lumps that you take can let you rise up above everything.”

https://www.nbcsportsphiladelphia.com/nfl/philadelphia-eagles/eagles-jordan-mailata-2023-team-2025-comparisons-similarities/698383/

I mean he knows better than us. He sees what they are doing in the week, he sees the mentality and the morale of the team. So if he says this is not even close to 2023 then it isn’t close to 2023.

But… this is 2023 😂. This team is going down and I’ll be absolutely shocked (though of course delighted) if this team wins more than 2 games the rest of the season.

A lot of these players (and coaches) saying the experience of having gone through that epic collapse in 2023 have better prepared them for how to handle a similar situation and avoiding a repeat. That is one thing I kept mentioning throughout the season, that hopefully the previous experience helps them to better navigate this situation to avoid another collapse. But so far we are not seeing any indication that they have learned anything from that experience, or that they can apply what they learned. They keep trotting out the exact same predictable scheme on offense and expect different results. But I do realize execution definitely factors in here ... probably hard to expect the injured players to execute their assignments better, but maybe they should be playing the backups and expect them to step up their game and execute better to yield better results. The penalties are out of control ... that can definitely be corrected. We are giving away a lot of free yards and wiping out big gains that are momentum killers with these damn penalties. For an offense that is struggling as much as ours is we simply cannot afford to have positive plays wiped out due to stupid penalties.

So, to put quite simply ... don't tell us Jordan, SHOW us!

In 2023 the defense collapsed. In 2025 the O-line is terrible (mostly due to injuries and penalties), so is it 2023 again? No. It's something worse.

18 hours ago, PoconoDon said:

In 2023 the defense collapsed. In 2025 the O-line is terrible (mostly due to injuries and penalties), so is it 2023 again? No. It's something worse.

Yeah the defense isn’t collapsing at the same rate this time… But the offense is.