Sack-a-Delphia - 19 Immediate Takeaways from Eagles 24, Commies 8
That, my friends, was an old-fashioned beatdown. You couldn’t have written a better script.
Synopsis:
“Eagles fans invade that stinking shit pile of a stadium to watch their team obliterate the Commies while sacking Carson Wentz nine times in the process.”
Siskel and Ebert give it two thumbs up! Get me Universal Pictures on line 1.
Did the Eagles take their foot off the pedal in the second half? Yeah, probably, but who cares? That game was over at halftime. There was a 0.0000% chance of Warshington mounting any kind of comeback. We’ve got the rest of the week to nitpick, and look for areas to clean up, but the only thing to do for the first 24 hours following a 24-8 win is to sit back, relax, and enjoy the fact that the Birds are 3-0 and look really damn good out there.
1) As well as the d-line played overall, it was nice to see them get after it early and often. A batted ball and a sack on the opening Washington series after giving up that 15-yard end-around? Fantastic. Wait – then they open the second series with two-straight sacks? Amazing. They really set the tone and held down the fort until the offense got it figured out in the second quarter, and from there it was all she wrote.
2) First Eagles drive, 3rd and 5, that was a zero blitz with a linebacker peeling off to spy Jalen Hurts. Originally they were doing a pretty job to contain him on these kinds of sequences, but it does leave 1v1 matchups down the field and that’s dangerous when a QB can wriggle free and find some space:
3) No way that Washington dude’s last name is “Wildgoose.” That can’t be real. I was trying to work a “Wildgoose chase” joke into this story, but this was the best I could do.
4) A slow-ish start for Jalen Hurts, but when you looked at the box score at halftime, he was sitting there on 279 yards and three touchdowns after completing 18 of 27 passes. No turnovers. He’s been playing winning football all season long and has so far answered every single question fans and media had about him.
5) What else is there to say about DeVonta Smith? Dude was incredible. It’s insane to think the Eagles have not one, but two guys who will go up and high point the ball, like really fucking attack it in the air. We’re a far cry from 2019 and 2020, when the Birds’ receiving corps resembled a dust collecting, empty cupboard . You can tell Hurts really trusts these guys to go up and get it as well, because he’s heaving balls downfield with regularity.
6) Smith as a punt returner was interesting. They used Britain Covey on the first punt, then threw Smith out there on the second punt, when Washington was backed up in their own 15. They went back to Covey again (and he muffed one), so it looks like it’s a field position-dictates-personnel kind of thing.
Also, Covey got absolutely smushed on more than one occasion. Good God, that dude took some hits.
7) Carson Wentz was Carson Wentz. He took some comically bad sacks. He held on to the ball way too long and coughed it up. His lack of pocket awareness and molasses-slow internal clock is a lethal combination, and when you add in the fact that he doesn’t use his legs the way he used to, he just looks like a lame duck QB out there. I can’t believe this is the same guy we watched in 2017. He looks nothing like the dude who was an MVP front runner back in the day.
(It also didn’t help that Washington kept putting him in five and seven-step drops. The entire Communist offense just looked slow as balls out there, not in foot speed, but mechanically. It’s wild because they’ve put up some points this season. They have some guys that can do things in space, but they were stuck in first gear all day long.)
8) I can’t believe the Eagles got away with that DeVonta Smith non-challenge. You could see on the broadcast that Riverboat Ron Rivera clearly threw the red flag AFTER the Eagles got off the next snap, which, by the way, was a brilliant piece of television directing and producing by the FOX crew. Excellent stuff to pull that wide shot and show us the flag throw in the same frame as the field of play (and then giving us the second angle coming out of the break).
If the refs had gone back and reviewed it, it looked to me like Smith was still controlling the ball and didn’t get his left leg back down, so it probably would have been overturned, but who knows? In rushing up to the line, the Eagles benefited from a 45 yard gain that put them in scoring territory.
9) Haason Reddick looks undersized out there. I tried to keep an eye on some of his defensive reps and he gets swallowed up pretty easily as a defensive end unless he’s able to bend and use his speed to get around a larger guy, which is what happened on the play where he knocked the ball out of Wentz’s hand. What would be interesting is to look at his pass rush win rate based on whether he’s deployed as a defensive end or a hybrid EDGE in that 5-2 look with Jordan Davis/Fletcher Cox/Javon Hargrave as the tackles. I don’t know if PFF or Sport Radar has that info, but I can check.
10) Pretty gross play call on the Zach Pascal 4th down sweep. Good decision to go for it, shit play call. A horizontal handoff for your WR4? –
#Eagles run a stupid play on 4th-down pic.twitter.com/ykU9sXLFR8
— DIE-HARD 🦅 REALTOR® (@Eaglesfans9) September 25, 2022
The Jack Stoll shovel pass was pretty fugly also. If you wanted to go negative about anything, their short yardage play calling was pretty whack at times in this game. That includes the safety following the goal line stop. Man, just line up, sneak it out, get yourself some breathing room, then go from there. They started Boston Scott back seven yards deep and he got swallowed up almost immediately when Dallas Goedert whiffed on that block.
11) Beautiful tackle by Avonte Maddox on Logan Thomas at the goal line. He just totally plastered a much bigger guy:
12) Penalties? 5 for 52 yards isn’t horrendous. The worst one was at the end of the third quarter, when Jordan Davis had that flag on the field goal after running into the long snapper. It sounds dumb, but that’s the rule. You can line up in the A gap but can’t push into the long snapper’s space.
13) Just 72 rushing yards for the Eagles in this game, but they didn’t really have to run since they were just dicing up the Commies in the second quarter.
14) 27 minutes of possession and a 5-15 third down mark. They didn’t “control” the game because they chunked together those points very quickly, but there was certainly room for improvement in the margins here. What’s important is that they didn’t turn the ball over and just kept at it offensively until the floodgates opened.
15) Anything else to be negative about? Special teams was a little iffy. That unit could be better overall I think, but again, it’s hard to split hairs after a mostly-comprehensive performance like that.
16) If you look at the Commanders’ official website and all of their official copy, they write “FedExField” as one word, but most of the TV stations and other journalism outlets say “FedEx Field.” They add the space in there. This is absolutely useless knowledge, but I just wanted to point it out. People simply refuse to do “FedExField” as one word.
17) Apparently FedEx is still a shithole:
There’s a fan here who has a towel over his head to protect him from the support beam that has been leaking water for the last few hours. Oof. pic.twitter.com/7aJcrOscd3
— EJ Smith (@EJSmith94) September 25, 2022
18) This was our second time getting Adam Amin, Mark Schlereth, and Kristina Pink this season. It it just me, or does it feel like we get this crew five times per year? I gotta look up the numbers. Just keep winning and we’ll get a new crew at some point.
19) The Eagles are gonna cruise to the division crown. The Giants are overachieving, the Commies stink, and the Cowboys are the Cowboys. Congrats to your 2022 NFC East champions, the Philadelphia Eagles.