Eagles fans aren’t just loud.

The love that they bring to their team rivals any of the best loyalties in modern sports anywhere. If you didn’t have an understanding of what that looked like before more than one million devoted Eagles souls packed the Benjamin Franklin Parkway last Friday around noon on Valentine’s Day for a chance to see a fleeting glimpse of their World Champion Eagles , you soon would.

My first exposure to what it meant to love our Eagles was at the “Body Bag Game” at Veterans Stadium against the same Washington Team that the Eagles ran out of South Philadelphia in the NFC Championship Game a little more than a month ago. No NFL players died during the making of that game in 1991, but the seemingly endless parade of Washington players being carted from the field with an array of bodily wounds was a whooping worthy of these 2025 Philadelphia Eagles.

It wasn’t that we Eagles fans reveled at the sight of opposing players being assisted from the field (OK, maybe we did) but rather the understanding by one of the smartest fanbases in the NFL about what a dominant defensive performance actually looked like.

The international reputation of Philadelphia Eagles fans hearkens back to the 1960 NFL Championship Game. Held right here in Philadelphia at Franklin Field — when the Eagles would win the Championship as Chuck Bednarik stood up Green Bay Packer’s running back Jim Taylor at the eight yard line as time expired. Moments afterward, Eagles fans stormed the field and tore down the goalposts on the frozen campus of the University of Pennsylvania.

Over the years, declining performances on the field and failed attempts at postseason play gave fans a reason to show their displeasure. Santa Claus was booed, snowballs serenaded the the field, and we even had a battery-packed ice ball contest utilizing Jimmy Johnson’s hair as a target akin to a game of wack-a-mole at the Sunday Fair. We even had a Bounty Bowl.

But the true essence of Philadelphia’s emotion for its Eagles that was on full display on Broad Street. The passing around of that sterling silver Lombardi Trophy by the Eagles’ championship players like a cigar-smoking Jalen Hurts, or beer-can-bonked Howie Roseman and Cooper DeJean — it’s truly unique to Philadelphia.

The 2018 season was the first in Eagles history to culminate with a Super Bowl parade. Neither a blizzard-won championship at Shibe Park in 1948, nor the first NFL Championship won on the west coast in 1949 that the Eagles captured, nor their predecessor the 1926 Frankford Yellow Jackets, nor the 1960 Eagles were honored with a celebratory parade.

The 1960 Championship would be the last professional football crown in Philadelphia in nearly 57 years. I never got an answer from my Dad about whether or not he was among the hoards of fans who stormed Franklin Field in December of 1960. All that he would say was that the Eagles were World Champions. Yes they are.

So for all of those NFL fans sitting in the frozen chill of February having last seen your team play in late December or early January and not just hoping for an active off-season and NFL Draft with nothing but contempt for an Eagles team loaded with talent for the next five years? It gives me great please to tell you: we just don’t care.

Michael Thomas Leibrandt is a Philadelphia Sports Nation contributor and a member of the Old York Road and Wissahickon Valley Historical Societies.