PHILADELPHIA—With a complete lack of ordered structure, a highly compromised cast of characters lacking a true protagonist, and no coherent resolution in sight, the Eagles—who began the season widely heralded as the best team in football—are enduring a postmodernist short-storybook season. "Taken as one body of work, the disjointed and almost halting series of vignettes that is the ordeal of the Eagles' weekly games—the empty victories, the shattering losses, and the sense that nothing good or pure can survive it all—is, in the best and bleakest traditions of postwar literature, compelling almost in spite of its inherent despair," said critic Michiko Kakutani, writing about the Eagles' "gorgeously incoherent chronicle of desperation and futility" in a review for The New York Times. "That they still have an outside chance of winning the NFC East adds just the right touch of meaningless, ultimately destructive hope to the whole narrative. Recommended." Kakutani also took time to deride the as-yet undefeated Green Bay Packers' season as "a barely credible litany of unattainable flawlessness showcasing the worst aspects of the American male-power fantasy."