Giants - Eagles game on MNF was not as bad as it looked.

Neil Greenberg, The Washington Post

The Eagles beat the Giants on Monday night, despite a game filled with miscues and mistakes. (Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports)

The Philadelphia Eagles beat the New York Giants on Monday night, despite a game filled with miscues and mistakes.

The Eagles sacked Eli Manning three times, had three takeaways and forced two intentional-grounding penalties. Sam Bradford, meanwhile, routinely made bad throws and saw three of his passes intercepted.

“We were stagnant,” Giants Coach Tom Coughlin said. “They did more with their opportunities than we did.”

The Eagles and Giants are now both tied atop the division at 3-3. The Dallas Cowboys, at 2-3, were on a bye and the Washington Redskins are, well, let’s just say they are a 2-4 team in transition. But the NFC East still isn’t the worst division out there.

[Opposing viewpoint: The Post’s Mark Maske says the NFC East is indeed awful]

According to Pro Football Reference’s Simple Rating System, which adjusts a team’s average point differential for strength of schedule, the NFC East is the only division in which all their teams are in positive figures. SRS is predictive because it weights all games and points equally, ignoring wins and losses, and is easy to use.

For example, the Eagles’ rating is currently 8.9. The undefeated Carolina Panthers, the team they play on Sunday, has a rating of 1.1. So, based on SRS, the Eagles are 7.8 points better than the Panthers this season. If we assume a three-point home-field advantage, then the system has the Eagles favored by 4.8 points in Carolina. Theearly Vegas line has the Panthers favored by 2.5, making this a game ripe for an upset.

And the Cowboys SRS is sure to improve once they get injured quarterback Tony Romo and wide receiver Dez Bryant back on the field.

Football Outsiders had the average NFC East team ranked No. 15 in their Defense-adjusted Value Over Average metric, which measures a team’s efficiency by comparing success on every single play to a league average based on situation and opponent, through Week 5. The AFC East was the strongest (average ranking of 10.8) followed by the AFC North (average ranking of 11.0). The NFC South and AFC South were the bottom two.

That game on Monday night was not pretty to watch, nor did it inspire much confidence in either the Giants or Eagles, but a look behind the performances shows that the NFC East is anything but soft.