Douglas Pederson met with the assembled media today and was asked if he still thought his decisions – namely, ceding the Giants six points as some sort of weird challenge – were the correct ones. Double Down Doug still believes that they were:

Q: Now that you’ve had time to reflect on it, how do you feel about your decisions to go for it on 4th down twice in that first half?

“I still feel strong about those. I think the decisions to go for it shows confidence and belief in the guys. At that time I felt like we were moving the ball, and again at the end of the day when you look at it we had more opportunities in this game, to me in my opinion, it didn’t come down to those two plays. There were enough things in this game again that cost us this football game. I still stick by what I did and how I chose to go for it in those situations.”

The five-point loss, quite literally, came down to the six points the Eagles left on the board.

Q: On the Carson Wentz run to the left it just seemed like the Giants were moving up before the ball was snapped and there was never any chance of that working. What did you see there?

“They blitzed us and they came actually off of the tight end side, and we ran to the left side and we missed an assignment. Again an assignment error on the play and in critical situations like that if one piece of it fails, then the rest of it kinda has to pick up that piece meaning there’s other pieces on defense that are free. And it just happened on that play again that we just failed on a block. It wasn’t a mental thing just a physical error that we missed on a block and it caused us not to get the first down.”

WHOM?

Here’s the thing Dougy MacBoatface is missing: You can’t make those risky calls and then blame their failure on execution. If you want to go for it, fine, but don’t run screen passes on third down and then predictable, DOA runs on fourth down. Both times the Eagles were stopped on fourth, the Giants completely snuffed the play out, and Doug blamed it on… execution? A missed assignment? Just one? Or three of them, because every large hulking man on the Giants roster tackled Carson Wentz in the backfield:

wentz

And on Sproles’ run?


sproles

Those aren’t execution issues! In theory, every play that fails could be an execution issue. They didn’t execute my play action wide receiver sweep reverse! But that’s setting your players up to fail. When there are three guys in the backfield, it’s not execution. It’s a bad, predictable play call. When four-foot-two Darren Sproles runs into the entire city of New York and also the neighboring Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut metro area trying to run up the middle on fourth down, that’s not execution, it’s a bad play call. What sort of parallel dimension is Doug living in? Where is he? What is he watching? What is he smoking? Because Josh Huff wants some. Even Chip Kelly would’ve taken the blame here. Oh I ran my quarterback into a sack orgy? That’s on me. IT’S ON YOU, DOUG. Do something different.