Anyone heading to Lincoln Financial Field for the Philadelphia Eagles‘ Black Friday game against the Chicago Bears might want to rethink the usual late-November wardrobe.
This particular holiday weekend is lining up to feel more like mid-January than anything resembling fall, and it won’t just be Philadelphia dealing with it. A handful of NFL cities are bracing for some nasty weather.
Cleveland might have the roughest forecast of all, with the 49ers and Browns expected to play in temperatures dipping under 40 degrees and a mix of rain and snow drifting around the stadium. Philadelphia isn’t getting hit quite as hard, but “not as bad” still doesn’t equal “comfortable.”
The Weather Channel’s outlook puts Friday afternoon at roughly 42 degrees with winds right around 20 miles per hour. That will drop to about 31 degrees by the end of the night.
The wind is supposed to lighten up as the evening goes on, but that doesn’t help much while you’re sitting there for three-plus hours waiting for your hands to thaw.
The matchup is part of the NFL’s Black Friday lineup, only the third time the league has held a game on this day, following the Dolphins‘ win over the Jets two years ago and the Chiefs‘ tight one over the Raiders last season.
Now the Eagles take the stage, and they’re doing it at a moment when the team’s season feels steady record-wise but tense underneath.
Philly’s playoff hopes may hinge on this weekend
The Eagles are sitting at 8-3, which would normally calm a lot of nerves, but this has been a strange year. Reports of friction between Jalen Hurts and A.J. Brown have hovered for weeks, and neither player has quite played to his usual ceiling.
Even so, Philadelphia is still right there in the race for the NFC’s top seed. They trail the Rams by a single game but already hold the head-to-head tiebreaker. A win over Chicago, plus a Rams stumble against the Panthers, would put the Eagles back in the driver’s seat.
Chicago, meanwhile, is 7-3 and carrying a different kind of pressure. If the Bears win, they’ll grab the head-to-head advantage over Philly and stay just ahead of the Packers (7-3-1) and Lions (7-4) in what is unexpectedly one of the tightest division battles this season.
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