If you subscribe to the adage that you are what your record says, the Eagles are the best team in pro football.
With an 8-1 record, the Eagles are atop the mountain at the midpoint of the season. Yet that means almost nothing if they don’t survive the most challenging part of their schedule.
Starting with a Super Bowl rematch with the Kansas City Chiefs Monday at Arrowhead Stadium, the Eagles play the most challenging portion of their schedule. The combined record of the Chiefs, Buffalo Bills, San Francisco 49ers, Dallas Cowboys and Seattle Seahawks is 30-16 (.652). All are in the playoff hunt, though the Bills (5-5) are struggling.
No one knows more about the urgency the Eagles face than Seth Joyner, the Birds’ Ring of Honor linebacker and Jakib Sports analyst.
“Those players know full well that they haven’t played their best football,” Joyner said on WBCB’s Pro Football Report at Chickie’s and Pete’s in Malvern. “And they know what kind of football they’re going to have to play down the stretch in order for them to get back to where they want to get to. (Coach) Nick Sirianni knows that. The players know that. They know that they’re 8-1 but they easily could have two or three more losses on their schedule. I give them credit for winning when they’re not at their best, when they’re not playing their best, when they’re not hitting optimum levels.
“But the truth of the matter is that the finality of the playoffs — one and done — is so much different than the regular season where you’ve got another week to come back and get it right. So, I’m not critical, I’m analytical.”
Gauging by the commentary of Sirianni and his players after a 28-23 win over Dallas, those remarks are on point. The breakdown goes beyond Jalen Hurts and his bruised knee, the big first half of the season by wide receiver A.J. Brown and the devastating injury to tight end Dallas Goedert, who fractured his forearm versus the Cowboys.
The Eagles allow just 66.3 rushing yards per game, tops in the league. They’re giving up 257.0 passing yards, fifth-worst in football. Prior to the bye week, they were first in rush defense and last in pass defense. Those extremes suggest a philosophical flaw, strange as that sounds for a team with just one loss.
The critics of defensive coordinator Sean Desai for not blitzing more don’t understand the big picture. The Eagles have had to find roles for a ton of players in the secondary due to injuries to James Bradberry, Avonte Maddox, Darius Slay, Bradley Roby and Reed Blankenship. Newly acquired safety Kevin Byard had to be thrust into a starting role immediately. The coverage and the pass rush are intertwined. If one is off, both misfire.
“I honestly believe that Nick Sirianni truly believes that, ‘we want to create explosive plays on the offensive side of the ball and we want to minimize explosive plays on the defensive side of the ball,’ so we don’t see this coordinator as aggressive as he wants to be,” Joyner said. “And I’ll give you a classic case in point. We rode Jonathan Gannon all of last year because he wasn’t aggressive enough and he leaves, becomes the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals and they’re blitzing like they’re losing their darn minds down there. So that tells me that the mandate was made to (Gannon), ‘No pressure. We want to bend but don’t break. That’s the way we’re going to play.’
“If that’s your mentality and the posture you put your players in, that passive posture, then you’re going to have games where you’re going to give up 374 yards, or 397 yards to a Sam Howell or a Dak Prescott. When you play off coverage and you’re relying on your defensive line to create pressure, even the most mundane of quarterbacks can look at a situation and say, ‘Oh, they’re coming. I’m just going to take the speed route, I’m going to take the slant, I’m going to take the stop route.’ It’s easy pickings for them.”
Joyner views Hurts as a modern-day Randall Cunningham, with an elite offensive line and a ton of weapons, entities in short supply when Cunningham was in his prime.
It’s just that the Eagles’ philosophy is so “offense-centric” that the defense has found it difficult to hit its stride.
“To use a golfing term, I think the defense has hammed and egged pretty darn good for most of the season,” Joyner said. “You’ve had weeks where the defense was dominant and really carried the team, like that Jets game, when it was absolutely phenomenal, and that Miami game. I mean the defense only gave up seven points to Miami. It was the offense that gave up the other 10 points with turnovers. The reason you have three phases in the game is when one phase isn’t clicking, the other two have to pick it up. But I just get the sense sometimes that this team is so offense-centric that they’re always going to look for the offense to be the reason the team gets itself out of trouble and has success.”
The loss to the Jets was an example of that, as Hurts was intercepted on third-and-9 with the Eagles nursing a two-point lead late. Instead of running the ball, burning clock and making Zach Wilson march the Jets into field goal range, Hurts gave the Jets a short field to score the winning TD.
To a man, the Eagles spoke about cleaning up shortcomings in the bye week. Now they get a chance to show what they’ve fixed.
Source: Berkshire mont