The Eagles did what they usually do on Sunday night, jumping out to a two-score lead and then slowing down in the third quarter before inevitably sealing the victory in the fourth.

It’s a pattern that fans and media have pointed out as the main flaw in an otherwise seemingly-flawless team, one that sits at 6-0 as we go into the bye week..

Sirianni has been asked about the second half struggles before, and this week’s day-after iteration of the query went something like this:

Q.I think (Sunday) night you said that you guys haven’t played a complete game yet this season. What does that look like to you, and how close do you think you guys are to playing such a game?(Martin Frank)

NICK SIRIANNI: It’s just finishing the game. Here is what makes it hard to play a complete game – a team that’s really good on the other side, right? That’s a good football team, as we know.

So, yeah of course we were up 20-3 at the half and would’ve loved to just duplicate that and won the game 40 to 6, but in the grand scheme of things that’s hard to do.

The second half is played a little bit differently, so you want to — you just want to finish the game. I think there is no doubt, right, that if we have good first halves and that the second halves, whether the defense has held them and the offense hasn’t scored or whatever it is, we haven’t played a complete game in the sense of we haven’t really blown open a game when we have had two-score leads.

From what I understand, I believe we’ve had two-score leads in every game this season, and so you want to just be able to end a game and put a game away. I think that’s what we’re talking about, is to just really finish the game and put it away.

Things change the way you view things in the second half sometimes when you do have these leads but you always want to be aggressive and always want to put points on the board, and we haven’t done that.

We’ll look at that as coaches and see what we’re doing as coaches, how we can put our guys in better positions to do that.

Sounds kinda dumb, but Sirianni is right when he points out that they’re not going to win 40-6. We had these discussions with Brett Brown’s Sixers every other day. It was naive of us to think they’d run out to a 20-point halftime lead and then go on to win by 40. It wasn’t about matching the first half performance, it was about finishing the game in a professional manner. Likewise, we wouldn’t expect the Eagles to replicate a 20-3 first half performance, but we also wouldn’t expect them to disappear in the third and cough up the lead they just built.

One thing worth noting is that the team that’s losing is going to be making the initial adjustments. The Eagles are rolling, the Cowboys are not, therefore Kellen Moore decided the other night to run some play action and bootleg to get Cooper Rush moving a bit. He worked his quarterback outside the pocket and tried to open up the offense a little bit. Combine that with some poor Eagle tackling, and it worked. Oftentimes, the Birds then find themselves adjusting to the adjustment, so one of the things they can do is try to work ahead and think about how the opponent might switch things up in the second half. They typically spend the third quarter figuring it out, then make the correction in the fourth, but some precognition would go a long way here. Easier said than done.


To fact check Sirianni, yes, his team has indeed had a two-score lead in every game this season. They were up 14 on Detroit at halftime, thumped Minnesota and Washington, came back to lead Jacksonville 29-14, and then enjoyed big leads over Arizona and Dallas. There’s only been one game, the Jags game, in which the Eagles had to make the first adjustment (pound the rock) and go from there.

As such, the differentials are just a goofy as you’d think. After six weeks of play, Sport Radar shows the following data:

  • first quarter differential: -7
  • second quarter differential: +85
  • third quarter differential: +3
  • fourth quarter differential: -25

Those second quarters are such a crazy outlier in terms of how good both the offense and defense are playing. +85  is almost double the next highest quarter differential for any other team, with the Bills going +44 in the third and the Jets (!) logging a +48 in the fourth.

The Eagles offense is ranked 30th in the second half (35 points scored) and the defense is ranked 18th (57 allowed), so it skews a little more towards the former if you’re looking for some nuance and/or blame here. Still, both units are in the bottom half of the league in the second half.

But again, we need to think about how we frame ideas like “finishing the game” or “putting it away.” It’s illogical to think they are going to mirror exactly what they did in the first half. What they can probably do better is be a little more aggressive defensively to open the third, identify opponent adjustments, and then try to make those counter moves a little quicker. There’s also the intangible side of it, where these guys just have to come out of the locker room and remain in 5th gear, or wherever they were in those second quarters. The tackling issues in the third quarter especially are extending drives and allowing the opposing offense to find some rhythm.

Outside of this, there’s been very little to complain about. They’re 6-0.