PHILADELPHIA — The Eagles are defending Super Bowl champions, they’re the winningest team in the NFL since 2022, they’re 4-1, and they have the best assemblage of talent and coaches in franchise history.

But all that seems to matter these days is how one player, A.J. Brown, feels about his quarterback, Jalen Hurts, his coordinator, Kevin Patullo, and his coach, Nick Sirianni. Especially now that the Birds bent over backward to make A.J. happy, and, for their effort, lost to the Denver Broncos, 21-17, their first defeat in 11 games.

They ran the ball with Saquon Barkley, their best player, just six times on Sunday, tied for the third-fewest rushes of his career. They threw the ball 38 times on Sunday, plus six other dropbacks that turned into sacks, so, 44 dropbacks. He is now 0-5 in games in which he drops back at least 44 times.

But hey, at least this time A.J. wasn’t mean-tweeting on his way home.

Brown got eight targets, and wasted a deep one that was open, but he stopped running.

“I’ll have to watch the tape,” said Hurts, who’d had plenty of time to watch the tape, since the game ended an hour before. Nick Sirianni, the coach, said the same.

“We just missed,” Brown said afterward, possibly having watched the tape.

Was Brown frustrated, again?

“I wouldn’t give you my frustration,” Brown said.

His review of the passing game, then?

“We started out pretty good, throwing the ball around the yard,” he said. “Just in finishing the second half, the inconsistency showed up again.”

Don’t argue this.

Brown is a 21st-century diva and a social media addict. He posted three days after winning Super Bowl LIX that he felt unfulfilled, that “My thrill for this game comes when i dominate.” He posted after the Eagles’ win at Tampa Bay last week that he felt ignored and, as such, he hinted that he wanted to be traded: “Shrug your shoulders and be on your way.”

Beyond the coaching strategies that Sirianni adopted, and beyond the leadership by word and deed of Hurts, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Eagles’ success is how they manage Brown. His tweets and ’grams and postgame comments — he overtly criticized the team’s “passing” during a stretch of ugly winning last season — have yet to fracture the foundation of this championship team.

Sunday provided the latest test of the team’s cohesion. So obvious and so inappropriate was Brown’s latest expression of discontent that Brown apologized for it during his weekly Wednesday media availability.

Of course, after Eagles legend and periphery analyst Seth Joyner criticized Brown’s act, the receiver couldn’t help but fire back with a racially charged post (since deleted) that implied that Joyner was hiding information to protect the team and was doing so to curry favor with the white man:

“How about you do your job and call out the bs but you won’t because they’re paying you so you have to play along and be a good boy.”

A Black man telling another he’s “being a good boy” because “they’re paying you” is obvious Uncle Tomming. But that’s an entirely different conversation better had on a different day.

On Sunday, what mattered was whether Hurts and Sirianni and Patullo could satisfy A.J.

Hurts threw a season-high 38 passes. He completed 23 of them. He compiled a season-high 280 yards. He had two TD throws. No interceptions. His passer rating was 100.8.

But he also took six sacks, about half of them because he wouldn’t throw the ball on time or he wouldn’t throw it away. He left enough meat on the bone to feed his entire offensive line, which, all things considered, played well against the No. 1 pass rush in the league.

Look, Hurts didn’t play badly. He just didn’t play well enough. He missed reads and he missed throws. Yes, every quarterback misses reads and throws every game, but Hurts missed more, and misses more, than most quarterbacks with 80 starts in the NFL, nine of them in the playoffs, two of them in Super Bowls. He took a sack with less than a minute left, with no timeouts, trailing by four points.

Inexcusable.

Hurts has qualities that lesser quarterbacks, and lesser men, lack. He conditions his body like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He studies the game like Peyton Manning; he even consults Manning. He drills mechanics like Michael Jordan, who also is a mentor. He is an elite runner, an accomplished winner, and a matured leader.

He is entirely acceptable as a quarterback of a perennial NFL contender.

As long as that team doesn’t have to throw too much.

Brown caught five passes for 43 yards on eight targets. He also drew a 24-yard pass-interference penalty in the middle of the second quarter that set up the Eagles’ first touchdown. He might have given up on a deep ball, but that’s the sort of complex, semibroken play that gets lost in the ether of a long season.

The series before that deep-ball failure ended on a pass slightly behind Brown that star cornerback Patrick Surtain knocked away. Brown turned on his heel, abruptly left the field, said something to a teammate as he crossed the sideline, went to the bench and plopped down, where receivers coach Aaron Moorehead, then Hurts, then Patullo came over to have discussions.

Such an interaction would mean little in the course of a normal season, in the career of a normal receiver. Brown has made sure that neither the season nor the receiver can be perceived as normal.

He shrugged his shoulders and was on his way.

Stay tuned.

All Brown has done since, basically, the end of the 2022 season is warn that the Eagles needed to better employ their air weaponry. He’s generally right, if generally inappropriate.

At any rate, the Eagles have thrived when they lean on the run and trust their defense. Certain games can be outliers — last year’s NFC championship game and Super Bowl, for instance — but Hurts isn’t consistently good enough at reading defenses and delivering the proper pass with the proper timing to the proper spot. So, against the better defenses, no matter how talented Brown, DeVonta Smith and Dallas Goedert may be, they will struggle to win if they primarily try to win through the air.

That doesn’t mean Hurts isn’t good. He’s good. Good enough to win games, to win titles, to make Pro Bowls, maybe even good enough to reach the Hall of Fame. That doesn’t mean he’s got the goods to beat good defenses designed to challenge his processing skills and his arm talent.

On third-and-17, Hurts found Smith, one-on-one, 52 yards downfield, his longest completion of the season.

The next play, Hurts looked for Brown, one-on-one, at the goal line. Surtain was called for a 24-yard pass interference penalty.

The next play, Hurts faked a handoff to Barkley, snatched it back, and hit Goedert for a 2-yard TD.

There were moments.

Just not enough of them.

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