50th Anniversary of the 1969 Eagles...

This is a topic EYE bet no one in the mainstream media will be celebrating…

First off, most of our readers here were not yet born in 1969.

That fact acknowledged, the 1969 Eagles were a hot mess and in many ways forgettable.

That team went 4-9-1. I was a senior in high school in Berwyn, Pa. As the torrential rains fell over the region yesterday, I was inspired to remember how miserable that season was, and how miserable I was as a teen wolf.

In 1969, Leonard Tose bought the Eagles from Jery Wolman for $16,155,000 (equivalent to $110,372,954 today), then a record for a professional sports franchise sale. Tose’s first official act was to fire Coach Joe Kuharich after a disappointing 24–41–1 record during his five-year reign. He followed this by naming former Eagles receiving great Pete Retzlaff as General Manager and Jerry Williams as coach.

It just didn’t work out, kind of like my life wasn’t working out that well either back then. Maybe that’s why I felt such an affinity for a bad team.

The omen was cast in the Eagles’ 1st-round draft selection of RB Leroy Keyes (Purdue) at #3 overall. That just never panned out. It got so bad, they tried to convert Keyes to a cornerback.

The roster for 1969:

1969 Philadelphia Eagles roster

Quarterbacks

10 George Mira
16 Norm Snead

Running backs

Wide receivers

Tight ends

85 Gary Ballman
87 Fred Brown

Offensive linemen

Defensive linemen

57 Ernie Calloway DT
83 Don Hultz DT
72 Floyd Peters DT
88 Gary Pettigrew DE
82 Tim Rossovich DE
58 Mel Tom DE

Linebackers

Defensive backs

28 Bill Bradley FS
27 Irv Cross CB
47 Ed Hayes
26 Al Nelson CB
24 Nate Ramsey S
21 Joe Scarpati FS

Special teams

38 Sam Baker K/P

There were some excellent individual talents on that team— veterans who knew their craft well. Talking about guys like Harold Jackson, Ben Hawkins, Floyd Peters, Nate Ramsey, Joe Scarpati, Mel Tom, Irv Cross, Al Nelson, Dave Lloyd, Sam Baker… but for a myriad of reasons, the team never jelled to the point of being able to win close games.

Week	Date	Opponent	Result	Attendance
1	September 21, 1969	Cleveland Browns	L 27–20	60,658
2	September 28, 1969	Pittsburgh Steelers	W 41–27	60,658
3	October 5, 1969	Dallas Cowboys	L 38–7	60,658
4	October 13, 1969	at Baltimore Colts	L 24–20	56,864
5	October 19, 1969	at Dallas Cowboys	L 49–14	71,509
6	October 26, 1969	New Orleans Saints	W 13–10	60,658
7	November 2, 1969	at New York Giants	W 23–20	62,912
8	November 9, 1969	at Washington Redskins	T 28–28	50,502
9	November 16, 1969	Los Angeles Rams	L 23–17	60,658
10	November 23, 1969	at St. Louis Cardinals	W 34–30	45,512
11	November 30, 1969	at New Orleans Saints	L 26–17	72,805
12	December 7, 1969	Washington Redskins	L 34–29	60,658
13	December 14, 1969	Atlanta Falcons	L 27–3	60,658
14	December 21, 1969	at San Francisco 49ers	L 14–13	25,391

I suffered through that entire schedule on my car radio for the most part—in a 1964 Valiant which was missing a 1st gear. Missing a gear kind of summarizes that entire Eagles season.

Five of those losses could have easily been W’s with better in-game strategy and execution, oh how I remember that frustration! We were so close to being 9-4-1 or even 10-4 it made me sick.

Maybe it’s that feeling of so close yet so far away that I identified with this team. It certainly resonated with my personal life.

The other thing was quarterback Norm Snead. You could bathe in his potential as a great passer, but something almost always went wrong in his game plan at the worst possible times. You wanted him to be better than Sonny Jurgensen for whom he was traded from the Redskins— but there was something missing. Sometimes metrics just don’t predict winning in the grand scheme of things.

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50th Anniversary of the 1969 Eagles…

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