The Eagles might be 5-8-1 if their special teams units were able to function with any sort of normalcy on Sunday in Arizona.

They had one of their punts blocked, lost their punter to a head injury, and then screwed up a long snap and lost an extra point. Later in the game, they got cooked on a Cardinals fake punt and needed Jake Elliott to boot the ball in place of Cameron Johnston.

It was a disaster all around, and this week special teams coordinator Dave Fipp had this to say:

“I would just say, at the end of the day, obviously I didn’t have our players prepared well enough to play the game. Certainly, wasn’t my best day out there. I’m disappointed in the results. Obviously, I expect better. On the blocked punt, we allowed a free rusher in the A-gap. We can’t do that. I think there’s a number of guys who could have helped out on the play. I am not going to get into all the specifics but like I said, at the end of the day, they weren’t prepared to handle it, we didn’t handle it, and we got to be better than that.”

He went into a little more detail about that blocked punt after a follow-up question:

“The bottom line is really it wasn’t even an overloaded look. They had our left gunner doubled on the outside, so they really only had seven guys in the box, we had eight guys to protect it. The bottom line is we didn’t execute well enough there and anytime there’s an execution problem I would say that personally for me, I would say I obviously didn’t do a good enough job of coaching them to get it done there. I’m not going to depart from that narrative. I’m fine with that, I can accept it. Like I said, I’ve had some good days, I’ve had some bad days. That wasn’t one of my better days right there. We didn’t have those guys ready to go, and I need to do a better job.”

Let’s take a look then.

Here’s the broadcast angle:

There’s the double team Fipp mentioned, at the top of the image. Left gunner doubled on the outside, right gunner gets single coverage. That’s three guys there, plus the punt returner, which leaves the Cardinals with seven men in the box going up against eight Eagles blockers.

The all-22 film gives us the good back-angle view, and this is what we see:

Marcus Epps with a whiff there. Well, it’s not even a whiff; he just didn’t attempt to block anybody. Rick Lovato is the long snapper, so he gets a chip on the first guy, then tries to put a body on the second guy, but it’s basically a 1v2 because Epps goes into the other A gap and doesn’t touch anybody at all.

Epps was also closest to the receiver on the fake punt that Arizona pulled, which, admittedly, was executed really well by their unit. Still, not a great day for him, not a great day (or season) for Dave Fipp and the special teams. It’s been a long time since the ST units were this much of a concern.