What's Reese Witherspoon - and 'God' - Have to Do with 49ers at Philadelphia Eagles?
We are going to assume that the Philadelphia columnist who opted to preview this NFL Week 13 Sunday showdown between the visiting San Francisco 49ers and the hometown Eagles by praising Niners QB Brock Purdy as a "god'' of sorts knows exactly what he's doing.
He's attempting to stir the pot. ... and by the time the name of Hollywood superstar Reese Witherspoon enters the conversation, he's succeeded.
"Jalen Hurts is admired and beloved here,'' wrote Mike Sielski in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "but Brock Purdy would be a god in Philadelphia. A god."
The core point of the pro-Purdy column? He is a young QB who was "Mr. Irrelevant,'' the last player taken in the last round of his NFL Draft. The concept, simply, is that Philly loves its "Rocky''-like underdogs.
(The idea sort of risks glossing over the fact that Hurts is also a bit of an underdog, having vaulted from being a non-first-round pick into an MVP candidate two years running. It also involves nothing more than an educated guess as to what a planet full of Eagles fans think of Hurts; it occurs to us that he's about as god-like as it gets.)
But by the time the column entered the social media discussion, one response came in from the actor Ryan Phillippe, a well-known Eagles fan who (playfully?) called for the dismissal of the columnist, the offense being his supportive words of the enemy.
"Fire this writer," Phillippe tweeted on Sunday.
The columnist's response? It's both clever and revealing - revealing in that it indicates he's enjoying basking in the attention of the silliness.
"When Reese Witherspoon's ex-husband tweets at you, you know you've made the big time," he tweeted.
