The Eagles got flagged a handful of times for ineligible man downfield on Monday night, the result of poorly-executed RPO plays. You saw on the broadcast replay that Cam Jurgens was too far from the line of scrimmage when Jalen Hurts pulled the ball and decided to throw. It led to some interesting discussion among former pros about the mechanics of the play, most notably Dan Orlovsky and Brian Baldinger diving in:

To answer the question, the offensive line really does not know if the ball is pulled to throw. It’s a timing play more than anything.

You have to block laterally, maybe hold a double team for a second or two, and then release to the second level. Jason Kelce explained it in response to Baldy’s post:

“Yea it sucks brotha, gotta try and generate movement fire off the ball for the run if it’s handed, but not go to the second level if it’s a pass.

The way we’ve handled it in the past is by having a tag that tells the linemen not to go downfield right away. You kinda just shuffle and sit on the double teams and wait for a second before climbing. Downside of that is that if it gets handed off you don’t get much movement as a result.

Some RPOs happen faster than others, so on some of them you just block normally because the throw happens quicker.

From the way guys are running downfield it doesn’t look like they are doing that shuffle technique. Maybe the team thought the throw was quick enough to not have to do that, but clearly it was a problem last night. I’d bet moving forward they put a tag on the play or tell the guys to wait a second before climbing on these plays.

I know these plays often help a lot, and I’m a fan of implementing them because they bail out a lot of bad run looks, but admittedly I hated running them because you had to run block timidly. Sucks when you are just doing your job and a penalty ends up getting called on you and it hurts your team. Infuriating”

“I hated running them,” says Kelce. It’s tough. At the NFL level, the threshold for downfield blocking is one yard. In the college game, it’s three yards. So it’s much, much easier to execute RPO at the collegiate level because you have more room to run block before becoming ineligible. At the NFL level, the running portion of the RPO is generally something lateral, like outside zone, because since the line can’t block downfield, you essentially have them shuffle sideways instead.

Beyond the RPO, however, there was a zone read that Jalen Hurts somehow turned into a three yard gain on Monday night. And they ran two that I recall in Brazil that were sniffed out almost immediately. The zone read and RPO game are both really ineffective right now, and were a huge part of the 2022 offense. It’s a combination of teams knowing what to expect, and poor execution. They might have to take both out of the playbook entirely and just stick with what works. Those were Nick Sirianni and Shane Steichen concepts, which got them to the Super Bowl, but they’ve been less than stellar for almost a year now.