Turns out the Eagles didn’t need DeSean Jackson to beat the Chicago Bears.

They tried putting him out there, but he played just four snaps before leaving the game for “precautionary” reasons, according to Doug Pederson.

If you’re into revisionist history, or like to tell people “I told you so,” you could go on Twitter and reiterate your opinion that Jackson shouldn’t have been on the field at all Sunday, instead given another two weeks to get his abdomen or whatever back to 100% health for the big showdown against the Patriots. But that’s not what the Eagles did, and now he’s back on the shelf for what Doug called “a couple of weeks.”

This is what he told the guy who hosts the WIP morning show:

“Leading up to the game, he had been in his rehab, running, and felt really good. He had a great week of practice and preparation and we had looked at the Bears game as a possible date for him to return and play. He felt good. It was something we had a lot of collaboration on, not only with our doctors, but with DeSean to play in this football game. He was going to be limited, we knew that going in. He wasn’t going to play the full game. Everybody was comfortable with that decision.

Hmm.. well I guess there are two schools of thought here. Either you work the guy back in with limited snaps or just wait until you think he can play a full game. Two different philosophies there, though in hindsight I guess the latter was probably the way to go.

Doug:

“He gets into the football game and he had a moment there where he said something felt something, and so we took him in for really precautionary reasons. And everything, what I heard after the game, checked out good. We’ll check him out again this morning. I’ll get an update here in a little while. But I fully expect him to be good in a couple of weeks.“

Everything in the abdominal/sports hernia family of injuries really is a bitch to return from. You can take three months and do absolutely nothing but rest and rehab, then you’ll go out and try to play again and the sharp pain comes back right away. It’s up under the crotchal area, which makes it really hard to stretch or loosen up; it’s just a weird feeling since you can’t really ‘access’ that area without a surgeon and a knife.