It was fun while it lasted.

DeSean Jackson went flying down the field for an 81-yard touchdown pass to put the Eagles up 14-3, while at the same time the Carolina Panthers were trouncing Dwayne Haskins and the pitiful Washington Football Team on their home field.

Was it happening? Were the stars aligning? Would the Eagles beat Dallas, dispatch Washington, and claim the NFC East crown?

No, they would not.

The ebullience lasted about five minutes, then the Cowboys went on to out-score the Birds 34-3 from that point on, and we can now stick a fork in this squad.


Winning the division and hosting a playoff game would have been fun, but you have to think about the upside in that situation. Is there any? Maybe they pull an upset against Tampa or another, better team, but likely they’d lose the game and go into the offseason with a lot of tough decisions to make.

That’s why 6-9-1 and a division title was always fool’s gold. It sounded good on the surface, but that would not have gotten the Eagles to where they really need to be. They need to decide whether or not they keep the head coach and general manager. Do they trade the franchise quarterback? Keep Jalen Hurts instead?

All of these decisions are easier to make when you go out and put up that kind of a clunker performance to eliminate yourself from playoff contention. The big picture becomes clearer. The charade is over. We don’t need to muddy the waters by winning the worst division in football and walking into the fan-less playoffs with a losing record.

This team needs change and this game should have been the final straw. It’s a blessing in disguise in the macro-level, long view department.

1. Hurts so half-decent

Hurts so good? Not on Sunday. Hurts so half-decent. He looked like a rookie as he started well before limping to the finish line.

We’re seeing a pattern where he plays well in the first half, then the defense makes some adjustments and he slows down a bit in the third and fourth quarters. This is part of the reason why:

You can tell he seems to want to leave the pocket a little earlier than he has to, and I don’t blame him. You’re playing from behind, you start taking a few hits, you get happy feet, and then things unravel a bit from there. The good thing is that the tools all seem to be there, and the mistakes look fixable, among them:

  • He had Miles Sanders wide open on the play where he ended up pulling it down, bulldozing a Cowboy in the end zone, but stepping out of bounds.
  • There was a timing error on the first snap of the fourth drive, with Dallas Goedert bumping into Hurts and throwing off that sequence.
  • multiple false starts and cadence issues
  • multiple fumbles this year
  • forcing the ball and getting picked off

None of this is unexpected. He’s a rookie making his third start. Let’s see what he does at home, against a really good Washington defense that has something to play for, and we’ll go from there.

Luckily for us we’ll get to see the QB on PRIME TIME next week, because the NFL just had to go and extend our misery by flexing the game to 8:20 p.m. –

2. pull and arc

This game absolutely sucked, so let’s talk about a little Xs and Os wrinkle. Something they can build on if they stick with Hurts.

We’ve talked a lot about zone read with the Eagles this year. Carson Wentz ran it before Hurts ended up with the starting job.

They’ve been adding some variety to the play by moving linemen and/or tight ends via pulling or arc motion, and you saw this during a successful run on the first drive. What happens is the quarterback reads the unblocked defensive end, but in this case they pull two linemen to the opposite side of the formation and the read is essentially flipped.

This is what it looks like:

Here you’ve got Hurts reading Randy Gregory, #94. Hurts can give the ball to Miles Sanders, but with Gregory staying put, Hurts is going to pull it and follow Jordan Mailata and Isaac Seumalo to the opposite side instead. Mailata is executing what we call an “arc,” where he rounds the corner and blocks the second guy, in this case Jaylon Smith, who eats a double team and just gets clobbered:

It’s fun stuff, something to expand on if they stay with Hurts. Not sure if you ever watched Colin Kaepernick during his college days, but Nevada ran a lot of this. Typically it was out of the pistol, but you can add wrinkles to zone read in a variety of ways.

It makes sense for the Eagles. They used wham blocking schemes pre-Hurts and really do a nice job pulling and trapping and hitting those cross-formation types of blocks.

3. D Jaxx and max protect

Great stat here from Tim McManus:

“That was DeSean Jackson’s fifth receiving TD of 80-plus yards — tied for the most in NFL history with Jerry Rice, Lance Alworth, Bob Hayes and Derrick Alexander, according to ESPN Stats & Information.”

Yeah, well, what the hell happened to DeSean after that play? He didn’t have a single target afterward and only played 20 snaps on his return from injury.

Anyway, this was max protect. Just send two receivers out, keep everybody else in to block, which looks like this:

Nothing complicated there. You buy yourself time, roll the QB to the right, and hope your speedster can get behind the defense. Dallas screwed it up, the safety took the wrong player, and DeSean was free. Is that his last highlight as an Eagle? Last highlight ever?

4. defense, or lack thereof

I feel bad for Michael Jacquet. MJ.

Dude is an undrafted rookie free agent who was THRUST into a starting role on a stinky, injury-plagued team. He gave up seven catches for 182 yards on nine targets. That’s a rough outing.

Jim Schwartz played a lot of man coverage in this game, and you’d think he might have tried more zone to try to keep some of the backups from getting toasted, but that wasn’t the case. We had an Izel Jenkins redux out there.

John McMullen with a good tweet to sum up the injury situation:

There’s not much for me to add that you don’t already know, but I’d like to point this out:

The Eagles haven’t beaten a decent quarterback in a dog’s age. In four wins this year, they’ve beaten Nick Mullens, Daniel Jones, Ben DiNucci, and Taysom Hill. Last year they beat Dak Prescott, who wasn’t 100% healthy. They beat Josh Allen on the road, before he turned the corner and became really good. You’d have to go back to September of 2019 and that Green Bay game to find the last truly impressive Eagle win against an high-quality quarterback.

The defense got cooked by Andy Dalton. That’s a bad way to go out, and the final word of this section goes to Jim Mora:

5. a Jalen Reagor comparison

Here’s an observation:

Jalen Reagor is Tavon Austin.

Exciting young gadgety hybrid guy coming out of college. Smaller, but explosive athletically, really quick game-changer type of dude. They can return punts and kicks and do end-arounds and all of that fancy stuff.

In the draft, the Eagles and Rams reach for each guy, they go into the NFL with relatively high expectations on their shoulders, and you see these flashes of brilliance, but for some reason that full potential is not unlocked. It’s like the genie remains in the bottle, or some other dumb cliche.

The good thing about Reagor is that he’s a rookie who was injured for a portion of this season, so we haven’t seen a true sample size from him. Tavon was mostly healthy through his early years in St. Louis and Los Angeles, but just never really had a break out. He had one 500-yard receiving year and reached 907 scrimmage yards in 2015, but even Sean McVay couldn’t make it work with Austin, back when McVay was innovative and exciting.

Let’s hope Reagor is not the next Tavon Austin, which really pains me to say as a WV guy.

6. Mistakes and breaks

It’s a long list:

Mistakes:

  1. DPI on the first Dallas drive
  2. deciding to put Boston Scott back there as a kick returner
  3. 3rd and 9 false start on Matt Pryor
  4. Cam Johnston horrible 17-yard punt
  5. final play of the first half, four blockers out in front, Greg Ward totally whiffs and Reagor is tackled
  6. red zone offside on Malik Jackson
  7. having to blow a timeout on 3rd and goal with defensive personnel scrambling
  8. Hurts blindside fumble (Mailata got beat)
  9. Matt Pryor holding on big Sanders run
  10. false start on very next play
  11. Seumalo false start to give us a 3rd and 23
  12. loved the false start followed by offsides on Dallas
  13. Hurts interception
  14. Hurts fumble
  15. Hurts’ second pick, in garbage time

Five false starts from the Eagles. Five! Outrageous! Even with a new QB that shouldn’t happen.

As for the fumble that they reviewed, what the hell are they looking at here:

Uhhhh…. okay.

Breaks:

  1. Boston Scott fumble recovered out of play
  2. Mike McCarthy starting out by calling a chickenshit conservative game
  3. Amari Cooper dropping a TD pass
  4. Mailata falling on fumble after allowing pressure
  5. Darius Slay finally making a big play

Slay’s interception was the first pick by an Eagles cornerback this year. That is incredible. In 14 prior games they couldn’t even stumble ass-backwards into a pick.

7. Ancillary wins and losses

Pretty barfy here:

  • lost time of possession 30:38 to 29:22
  • -2 turnover margin
  • 7-17 on third down (41.7%)
  • 1-2 on fourth down
  • Cowboys went 6-13 on third down (46.1%)
  • lost 16 yards on three sacks
  • 1-3 success rate in the red zone
  • 12 penalties for 115 yards
  • 24 first downs, 22 for Dallas
  • ran 71 total plays, Dallas 66

Twelve penalties for 115 yards is incredible. Playoffs on the line, division title on the line, and you go out and do that.

8. Doug’s best call?

There were some nice individual calls in there, like the two we went over earlier. Overall it seemed like a good “micro” game from him but a terrible “macro” game.

9. Doug’s worst call?

Not sure about the running play on 3rd and 4 during the third drive. That seemed really timid. And guess what happened? Dallas marched right down the field, scored, and made it a 14-10 game. Talk about a missed opportunity there.

Said “Big Bet” Bob Wankel:

Similarly, the 4th and 3 delay of game and decision to punt was another bizarre sequence. That did not seem like an intentional hard count. Regardless, go for it anyway. What’s the difference? The defense hadn’t stopped anybody to that point, but you won’t go for it on 4th and 8? Then you decide to go for it on 4th and 15 on the next drive?

Said Doug:

“The 4th and 3 I had to burn a timeout, because we had 12 on the field early there in the third. I didn’t wanna burn another timeout in that situation. That backed us up and took us out of that situation. The other ones were, look, we had to make something happen. We had to try to create and make a play and get back into the football game, so I elected to (go for it).”

Well, okay, but it was 30 to 17 at that point with more than 14 minutes remaining in the game. You could have tried a 51-yard field goal, cut the deficit to 10, and then tried to get a stop following the kickoff. Seems like Doug had his wires crossed in this game.

10. Broadcasting excellence

Kenny Albert with Jonathan Vilma and Shannon Spake.

Did you hear Vilma say this in the first? –

“Doug Pederson is run first. Don’t ever forget that.”

That was your proof that Vilma has never watched the Eagles before. If Doug Pederson is a “run first” coach, then I’m Freddie Mercury on lead vocals, performing at Live Aid.

How about the cool TD celebration camera shots? It’s called the “megalodon” camera, named after the badass shark, I think… It’s an 8k camera that gives a really gnarly cinematic feel, which adds a unique dynamic to the broadcast. The camera costs $10,000, so you and I ain’t getting one.

Finally, before parting, I have to admit that I laughed out loud when the refs’ mics were open when they were talking about the false start penalty on Matt Pryor, which resulted in them saying “we’re gonna do 69.”

Audio:

That was pretty good. A moment of childish humor to light up an otherwise bleak and miserable Eagles performance. Nothing about this season has been enjoyable and now we only have to suffer through one more game before it’s over.

Good morning.