49ers blowout win against the Eagles meant more than revenge

The theme of an NFC Championship rematch dominated Sunday’s game between the 49ers and Eagles, and for good reason.

San Francisco was returning to the Philadelphia site of last season’s blowout playoff loss. Trash talk from the months since the last meeting had resurfaced, with new barbs emerging as the game approached. Perhaps most importantly, both teams had once again separated themselves as the best in their shared conference.

“It means a lot,” San Francisco pass rusher Nick Bosa said. “Obviously we wanted some payback. We tried not to think too much about last year. But we knew we could match up with them and more than that. So I think we proved a good point.”

That point: When healthy, the 49ers are the best team in the NFC, and perhaps the NFL. That’s the best takeaway from Sunday’s win, not vengeance. At the end of the day, the Eagles still won the Super Bowl trip 10 months ago. Even the Niners tried not to equate the two games: Head coach Kyle Shanahan told reporters after Sunday’s win, “I don’t think the emotions were there like you would think.”

Quarterback Brock Purdy, whose elbow injury in that January matchup defined the game, dismissed the idea of a “revenge game” entirely.

“It was sort of in my mind, yeah, man, I got hurt here,” Purdy said Sunday. “You know, that was this year, late in January. But was it going to be the revenge game or anything like that? No. For me, it was Week 13. We’re going into a whole new year, a hostile environment. We needed this game.”

“I didn’t want to get distracted by, ‘I’ve got to go back and show everybody what could have happened or what could have been,’” he added.

It’s certainly a classic athlete platitude to downplay emotions of a game during the regular season, but it is indicative of the bigger task at hand for this Niners team. Beating the Eagles in Week 13 is not the same as beating them in the playoffs, and a win in early December is definitely not the same as a win in late January.

That can’t change what happened last January. But it shows what can happen the rest of December, this January and maybe even this February, too.