Nick Foles leads late drive to push Eagles past Bears in NFC wild-card

CHICAGO — If this past year or so has taught the Eagles anything, it’s that anything can happen. And when it does, it’s usually in their favor.

So even on Sunday night, as the Bears were lining up to try a potential winning 43-yard field goal with 10 seconds left in an NFC wild-card game at Soldier Field, the Eagles were oddly confident.

“Honestly, I had a feeling that one way or another, we were going to win that game,” safety Malcolm Jenkins said. “Something was going to happen in our favor . . . We’ve been through so much, it’s hard for me to not believe things are going to work out in our favor.”

The magic continued.

The Bears’ Cody Parkey, who had missed 10 field-goal attempts during the regular season, bounced this one off both the left upright and the crossbar before it fell in the end zone, and the Eagles hung on for a 16-15 win over the third-seeded Bears.

The defending Super Bowl champion Eagles, who needed to win their last three games and get help elsewhere just to get into the playoffs as the sixth and final seed in the NFC, will face the top-seeded Saints in a divisional-round game Sunday.

Parkey’s ill-fated kick was the rare four-thudder. He made contact with the ball and defensive lineman Treyvon Hester stretched his left hand in the air and grazed it just enough to alter its trajectory. The kick had plenty of distance, but it hit the left upright about midway up the pole. The ball still seemed as if it had a chance to go through, but it then plinked off the crossbar and fell back toward the field of play.

“It’s one of the worst feelings in the world to let your team down,” Parkey said. “I feel terrible.”

He said he would be able to “sleep at night knowing that I did everything in my power this week to make that kick, and for whatever reason, it hit the crossbar and the upright.”

The game actually came down to two critical timeouts called by Eagles coach Doug Pederson. The first was just before a fourth-and-goal play with 1:01 left, when he wanted to make sure his Eagles, trailing 15-10 at the time, had the right play for the situation.

In fact, they had called that play twice after reaching the 1, but quarterback Nick Foles had checked out of it to a run based on the Bears’ defensive look.

“Nick and I, we talked on the sideline and said, you know, let’s just run this sprint-out,” Pederson said.

Philly Nothing-Very-Special. Other than the execution, anyway. They expected the Bears to blitz on fourth-and-goal, and they did. But Foles rolled to his right, sidearmed a throw under the oncoming pass rush from Leonard Floyd and hit Golden Tate for a 2-yard touchdown pass that made it 16-15 with 56 seconds left.

“There was pretty much one option [on the play called], and that was me,” Tate said. “I did a decent job of setting [cornerback Sherrick McManis] up and got open and it was friendly and Nick threw an absolute dime. If he throws that ball any farther in front of me, I can’t get to it, and any farther behind me, the DB has a chance to break it up.”

After the Eagles failed on their two-point attempt, the Bears’ Tarik Cohen returned the ensuing kickoff 35 yards to Chicago’s 42. Mitchell Trubisky hit Allen Robinson for a 25-yard gain and then an 8-yard pickup to get to the 25 with 15 seconds remaining. Knowing that they had a tenuous kicking situation, the Bears took one last shot at a touchdown, but Trubisky’s pass for Anthony Miller was overthrown in the end zone.

The Bears had to send Parkey out for the 43-yard try. And his kick was . . . good.

Enter the second critical timeout called by Pederson, this one just before the snap. Parkey’s kick on what turned out to be a practice try almost was short, but it went through. Still, he had to do it again.

With some Eagles admittedly praying, Jenkins said he spent the timeout yapping at his former teammate across the line of scrimmage.

“I was talking a lot of trash,” he said. “I anticipated him missing. Nothing against Cody. I love him as a former teammate . . . We knew he had some struggles and missed a couple this year.”

He missed this one, too, and it went the Eagles’ way.

It was the latest example of Pederson having a penchant for pushing the proper buttons.

“He’s got a knack for doing the right thing,” Eagles defensive end Chris Long said.

Things worked out for the Eagles. Of course, over the past two seasons, just about everything has.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.