The Eagles have been mistake-prone this season. But those correctable mental and physical errors haven’t been their only problem — and maybe not even their most pressing one.
There has been a lot of public talk from the Eagles this week about the intangible measures they can take and improvements they can make in the name of breaking their two-game losing streak and playing better all-around football.
Jordan Mailata, one of the team’s captains, told reporters that, in last Thursday’s embarrassing loss to the Giants, players weren’t as focused as they ought to have been. His message: “Do your [bleeping] job.” (Has any NFL player ever enjoyed cursing, then apologizing for cursing, as much as Mailata?) Saquon Barkley suggested the turnaround should start with him returning to the basics of his position: keep his eyes up to find the right hole or lane to run through, make sure his shoulders are square. And Nick Sirianni spoke of the need for each team member to enter, or re-enter, a kind of mental cocoon inside of which their attention is consumed by their roles and responsibilities.
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“There are distractions, and that could be with successes; that could be with failures,” Sirianni said Friday, two days ahead of the Eagles’ matchup Sunday in Minneapolis against the Vikings. “If you let yourself get into things that you can’t control or aren’t important, one or the other or both, all you’re doing is limiting yourself from playing the best football or coaching your best football that you can do. That’s important for all of us to know, to lock in and focus on what we have to do. … It’s within the process of your week that puts you in a state to play a good game, that gets you ready to play a good game.”
All true. All fine as far as those factors go. The Eagles have been mistake-prone this season, certainly more than they were last season. But those correctable mental and physical errors haven’t been their only problem — and maybe not even their most pressing one.
In his comments following that Giants loss, Lane Johnson used the word “predictable” more than once to describe the Eagles’ offense. To be as basic as one can be about this topic, if Johnson is right — and anyone who has watched the Eagles’ first six games knows he is — then every offensive player could be doing his job to the highest effort and with the greatest precision, and the Eagles would still have a problem. The opposing defense would still know what the Eagles were going to do play to play, and unless you have the best offensive line in football (which the Eagles did last season and don’t this one), it’ll be difficult to gain yards and score touchdowns with any consistency.
Jalen Hurts can do his best to get the ball to A.J. Brown on every play, and as long as Brown is running nothing but basic square-ins and comeback routes, as long as the cornerbacks and safeties are pretty certain where he’ll be and when he’ll be there, even a receiver of Brown’s talent and strength can be neutralized.
Focus and precision have been issues for the Eagles, sure, but so has strategy: how offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo designs a game plan, how he calls plays, what plays Hurts feels most comfortable running, what plays Patullo needs to call and Hurts needs to execute so that the offense can counteract what defenses are throwing at them. More Barkley runs outside the tackles? More intermediate throws to the middle of the field? A deep shot to Brown or DeVonta Smith early on?
Sirianni wouldn’t concede that freshening up the Eagles’ game plan or scheme was necessarily more important than, say, increasing the team’s level of concentration and focus. “I don’t think the answer has to be one or the other,” he said. “The answer is yes to both. We have to continue to get better in all cases.” But his greatest strength as a head coach has been his ability to connect with and motivate his players. (Imagine how much more damaging Brown’s flareups on social media and during his postgame interviews would be if he and Sirianni didn’t have such a good relationship.)
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The identity and proficiency of the offense, however, have been major questions for him and his staff early in the 2021 season and throughout the 2023 season, now this season, and those calls and choices and results are questions again now. They will be the most intriguing aspect of Sunday’s game. No matter how sharp the Eagles may have been during practices and meetings this week, they still have to show that they can devise something new and different on offense before anyone will believe that they’re back to being close to the team that won a championship eight months ago.
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