I don’t think any realistic fan went into Sunday’s game against the Seahawks thinking the Eagles would leave Seattle with a win. Really, they just hoped the team would be competitive and give the Seahawks all they could handle. Based on how the season had unfolded so far for both teams, I guess that was a fair expectation. After all, the Seahawks only had two wins by double digits — against the 49ers and Jets, two of the league’s five worst teams — and the Eagles had yet to lose by more than a touchdown. Still, this had all the markings of a blowout going in, and though the Eagles were able to hang tough for most of the first half, they kneecapped themselves with a few crucial mistakes and then fell apart completely in the second half. For the first time all season, this team was taken to the woodshed in every facet of the game and it never felt like they had a chance. Meanwhile, the other three NFC East teams won and if the Eagles, who have now lost five of seven, want to have a shot at a playoff berth, they need to win five of their last six games.

THE GOOD

The first touchdown drive

This was such a joy to watch, albeit somewhat sadly since it embodied the only way the Eagles can be successful on offense — slow, plodding and painfully methodical, like enacting the scientific method. The first two drives accumulated just 43 yards on 10 plays — with 40 of those yards coming on four carries, which set the stage for the next time the Eagles got the ball. Everything came together on the third drive, and the result was a 2016 Carolina Panthers-esque 13-play, 68-yard drive that converted all three of its third downs and ate up 7:35 of clock. The offense matriculated the ball down the field in six 4-7 yard chunks and was able to mix in two passes that went for more than 10 yards. Naturally, Brent Celek was responsible for the longest gain of the drive: A 19-yard catch-and-tough-slow motion-run after Carson Wentz niftily stepped up in the pocket and found him over the middle.

Zach Ertz

As far as stats that count go, he had six catches for just 35 yards but also scored his first touchdown of 2016 by running a beautiful snag route and then reaching one of his 31.75″ T-Rex arms over the goal line. Of course, his 57-yard touchdown run on the perfectly-designed delayed screen was wiped out by Nelson Agholor’s brain fart to end all brain farts.

Ertz deserves the flack he gets from fans and still hasn’t broken a tackle this season, but he’s started to emerge a bit over the past three weeks (20 catches, 187 yards) and is building a rapport with Wentz. Hopefully that can translate into some big plays because, as things stand, he’s not a threat down the seam or as a vertical stretcher at any level of the field. In fact, if Ertz’s current 9.6 YPC persists, it’ll mark the fourth straight season in which his YPC has decreased (even though his total catches and yardage numbers increased in each of his first three seasons). He’s become an average possession tight end, instead of the dynamic offensive weapon the Eagles thought they were getting when they drafted him (and when they signed him to an extension this past offseason), in an offense that so desperately needs a playmaker to step up. But don’t worry, December is only one game away.

Wendell Smallwood

Smallwood was getting touches even before Ryan Mathews and Darren Sproles went down with injuries, and while it looks like both veterans will be able to play against the Packers, the rookie deserves to start shouldering more of the load. He gained 48 yards on 13 carries but also got involved in the passing game, catching four balls for 31 yards and finishing with 79 total yards on 17 touches. Yes, 36 of those 79 total yards came on two touches, but in a game where we have to use a magnifying glass to find positives, I feel it’s worth noting that the rookie provided some value to an otherwise lifeless offense.

Doug Pederson

I know some of Pederson’s play-calls and decisions (both in-game and personnel wise) have been aggravating, and, yes, he can get a little too reliant on short stuff and be conservative in the red zone. But for a guy who doesn’t have anything to work with on offense, damn, he can really scheme to create open space and has some imaginative formation-play call combinations on offense.

The offense simply didn’t have the horses to get anything done against the Seahawks defense, but I’m encouraged that Pederson can direct a top-10 offense if he gets some talent to work with at the skill positions.

THE BAD

Defense

The defense, the backbone of the 2016 Eagles, really let the team down in a major way in this game. C.J. Prosise’s 72-yard run set the tone, but what was really discouraging and turned the tide was how the defense so weakly responded after the Eagles’ touchdown drive to take the lead.

It started auspiciously enough. An incompletion and two false starts left Russell Wilson and company with a 2nd and 20 at their own 10-yard line. This was the defense’s chance to pounce, to get after Wilson. Instead, the call was for the them to sit back and give 20 yards of cushion to the wide receiver. It wouldn’t surprise me if Jim Schwartz thought it was third down (I did), because that’s exactly what the call was designed to do — give up 15 yards, but make sure the defensive back was in position to make the tackle before the first-down marker. Wilson had an easy pitch-and-catch to Jermaine Kearse for 15 yards, and he fought for an extra two to bring up 3rd and 3. An easy six-yard completion to Jimmy Graham, who had about 10 yards of cushion, kept the drive going.

Later on, following an offensive pass interference penalty the Eagles once again had the Seahawks in a long yardage situation with 3rd and 16. Brandon Graham false-started. Then Wilson did something only Russell Wilson can do and turned what started off looking like a throw out of bounds into an are-you-kidding-me completion that Graham took the rest of the way for the touchdown to put Seattle up for good.

Including the long touchdown they gave up to the Falcons last week following a field goal, that’s now 10 (!!!) times in the past seven games that the defense has “answered” a score (eight by the offense, one by special teams and one by the defense itself) by immediately letting the opponent score points of their own. What’s worse, eight of those 10 scores by the opponent have been touchdowns. This unit is incapable of pitching the football equivalent of a shutout inning and it’s absolutely demoralizing, especially when the offense can barely do anything and has a ceiling of two touchdowns per game. For a unit that is ranks third in the NFC in points allowed and gets talked about so highly, it certainly comes up small in critical moments.

Lastly, as I watched the Seahawks play the Patriots, I was compelled to tweet this:

I got six responses saying the Eagles defensive line against the Seahawks offensive line was where they matched up well. The Seahawks ranked top-10 in the league with just 19 sacks allowed going into Sunday, but of course having a mobile quarterback like Russell Wilson makes up for shoddy pass protection. The Eagles defense, meanwhile, came into the game ranked top-10 with 25 sacks and a line boasting some star talent in Brandon Graham and Fletcher Cox. HOWEVER…

And disappear, they did.

No, they cannot. The defense managed just one sack, and though the box score lists six quarterback hits, Wilson was under very little duress and had ample time to pick apart the secondary. Graham, Cox, Bennie Logan, Connor Barwin, and Vinny Curry were all stonewalled by the Seahawks offensive line on passing downs.

Overall, the only way the Eagles were going to have a chance in this game is if the defense took over in the same manner it did against Atlanta. Instead, they were abused and embarrassed. The defense gave up 300 yards of offense to the Seahawks in the first half, then got pantsed on the Doug Baldwin-to-Russell Wilson touchdown pass to put the game out of the reach in the third quarter.

The offense between its two touchdowns

Shield your eyes: Eight drives, 34 plays, 71 yards, five punts, three turnovers (two interceptions, one on downs). Woof.

Carson Wentz

Wentz didn’t play well, regardless of getting absolutely zero help. He missed reads, sailed throws, and his deep ball was Nick Folesian. Wentz has undoubtedly struggled overall since the bye week, and there’s a legitimate argument to be made that special quarterbacks raise the level of play of their supporting cast. Look no further than Wentz’s counterpart in this game and how he played as a rookie. However, please don’t act like this game was a negative referendum on the rest of his career.

Seriously, what exactly was Wentz supposed to do? It’s hard enough to be a rookie going into the most daunting environment in the NFC. Add in the fact that you’re playing one of the best continuous defenses of the modern era and your skill position players are actually somehow worse than the 49ers’ and, well, that’s a recipe for disaster. Penalties and drops left another 100-plus yards and a touchdown on the field, too. I’ll never be mistaken for being an optimist, and maybe I’m wearing midnight green-colored glasses here, but there were positive signs from Wentz in this game and, despite being under siege from the league’s most ferocious defense, I still never found myself thinking, Jesus, he really looks totally shellshocked, lost and helpless out there. 

THE UGLY

Nelson Agholor

And you thought it’d be impossible for the Eagles to make a worse first-round pick than Danny Watkins or Marcus Smith (who’s actually turned into a capable backup defensive end!). We’ve finally reached the long-overdue crisis point with Nelson Agholor. Two plays, devastating mental fuck-up followed by same-shit-different-game physical fuck-up, couldn’t better summarize the horror show that’s been his career through two seasons. Physical errors are going to happen, but mental errors are inexcusable because they involve only one easily controllable variable — your brain. Agholor’s quite obviously a smart guy off the field, but he’s so football dumb it’s unbearable. Illegal formation penalties are fairly frequent, but how often are both your coach and the official trying to get you in position from five yards away? This is by far the best play Pederson and Frank Reich had devised all season, and it worked brilliantly — all except for one player (Chip Kelly sleeper agent?). The double dick-shot is that the play didn’t count and is now on film so opposing defenses will be able to immediately recognize and diagnose it should the Eagles ever try again.

Seeing as how this is the last 56 years of Eagles football in one gif, it’s no surprise that the two words that immediately jump to mind are “humiliating incompetence.” I would’ve loved to see Greg Lewis pull rank and call a timeout, then — and this is how tragic things have become — put on a uniform and take Agholor’s spot on the field for the ensuing snap.

If the above play wasn’t enough to shake their confidence, Pederson and Wentz doubled down and went right back to Agholor on the first play of the next drive. He ran a great route and got easy separation from Richard Sherman over the middle. Wentz delivered a pass on the money, and Agholor had plenty of turf in front of him to make something happen. One problem: Instead of trying to catch the ball with his hands, he let the ball get into his body and tried to trap it against his shoulder. Doink, drop, two-palmed helmet slap, expletives all across the Delaware Valley.

There’s no criterion for snap percentage on Football Reference and I can’t search for “All WRs ever” in the player comparison function, but I have to imagine Nelson Agholor is among the worst wide receivers in NFL history — if not THE worst — when you compare his production relative to playing time. Despite being healthy and playing every game, he’s even somehow managed to regress from his rookie season! Agholor ranks 136th (!!!!!) in receiving yards (264), despite playing 93% (!!!!!) of the snaps, and hasn’t scored a touchdown since Week 1. He’s sandwiched on the receiving yards list between Devin Funchess (266 yards, but on just 16 catches) and Andrew Hawkins (257 yards on 25 catches), both of whom have scored three touchdowns. Julio Jones has more receiving yards than Agholor in one game. But credit where it’s due, he still has more receiving yards than Dorial Green-Beckham in 2016.

This kind of unprecedented futility is astonishing, it defies explanation, and Sunday was the cherry on top. The illegal formation and wide open drop are the two plays for which Agholor will be most remembered when his Eagles career comes to a merciful end (after 2017 since it’ll cost more to cut him than keep him for next season), but the most damning thing about him is that he’s made Eagles fans long for Riley Cooper and Miles Austin.

Agholor’s media scrum after the game was heartbreaking and you can’t help but feel for the kid. By all accounts, he is a hard worker (cue Juan Castillo’s “hard work, work hard”) and good soldier. However, Ray Didinger said something eye-opening about Agholor on the radio last week. To paraphrase:

What struck me the most when I saw him in training camp was that he looked the same. He hadn’t done anything to improve his body in offseason. On the other hand, Jeremy Maclin, who has a similar build, knew after his rookie season that he needed to get stronger in order to deal with NFL cornerbacks, and he came back noticeably more muscular in year two. I don’t know what Agholor learned as a rookie and if he thought he didn’t need to put in that kind of extra effort and work harder than he ever had in his life, or if he thought that a new coaching staff would be the solution. But seeing him in training camp, he struck me as a player who didn’t do everything possible in the offseason to make sure he’d put a disappointing rookie season behind him and be a much better player in his second season.

That’s brutal, and it’s taking every fiber of my being not to make a joke about Agholor also failing at paying for sex in the offseason. Anyway, Pederson would never kill his own player in the media (he coddled him instead), but Agholor would’ve been benched a long time ago if he wasn’t a first-round pick. So hooray for preferential treatment. Activating Paul Turner from the practice squad would seem to indicate Sunday’s shenanigans were the last straw. Even if it’s not Turner, how about at the very least cutting Agholor’s playing time from 93% to 50% and giving his snaps to literally anybody else?

WHAT’S NEXT

The free-falling Green Bay Packers at home. This season’s narrative is that Aaron Rodgers is struggling (and the tabloids are feasting on the fact that he and his family are engaged in a cold war), yet he’s on pace for 4,400 yards (albeit just 6.7 YPA) and 40 touchdowns. He’s not at his previous level, that’s for sure, but it just goes to show the standard he set for himself. The offensive line has always been terrible, but Rodgers’ mobility and wizardry helped make up for it, as did the array of top-level skill position weapons at his disposal.

This season has seen a dramatic drop-off in those skill position players. Eddie Lacy is out for the season, James Starks (still in the league!) is averaging under 3.0 YPC, and their best running back, Ty Montgomery, is a wide receiver. Jordy Nelson is a shell of himself at age 31 coming off the ACL tear, but he, Davante Adams and Randall Cobb will still be a handful for the Eagles cornerbacks. Jared Cook had 53 receiving yards on the season but then torched Washington on Sunday night for 103 so I’m sure he’ll go Vernon Davis all over us.

Mike McCarthy being a bottom-10 coach, age, injuries, and a lack of depth have doomed the Packers. Their defense is down to third- and fourth-stringers at linebacker and in the secondary and has turned into a second-half-of-the-2015-Eagles-season dumpster fire. I don’t care if the drops continue or if Kyle, Jim, and I are out there at receiver, I’ll start sounding the alarm if Wentz can’t bounce back and pick apart this defense. The Packers still have a chance to win the NFC North, but even if they haven’t given up on the season, they’ve just run out bodies. This figures to be a high-scoring game and Rodgers’ last stand of the 2016 season — he’s going to will his team to stay in it, but I think the Eagles defense manages to make a stop at the end to secure the win and keep hope alive for another week.