Eagles

Excitement for an Open Practice Wheel Route Shows Just How Much Eagles Fans Were Starving for Some Offensive Creativity

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Aug 26th, 2026 · 10:35 AM EDT

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Combing through some of the video from Tuesday night’s open practice and this one stood out:

Lemon TD
by u/Bulldawgzz in eagles

Why did it stand out? Well, probably because the Birds lined up a receiver in the backfield and then had him run a wheel route. Yeah, the defense was all of whack, but that’s not the point. Did the Birds do either one of those things last season? Did they run a single wheel route or deploy any receiver in any sort of unique way?

Not that I recall, though, to be fair, we’ve probably purged most of 2025 from memory.

But this video is all over the timeline, and the most basic of offensive creativity is resulting in comments like this:

• Schemed open plays like other teams do…? BURN THE WITCH
• I much prefer throwing to Smitty in double coverage and hoping he makes a miraculous play
• Woah…the WR goes around like a wheel route and D is lost? What is this trickery???
• I’ve watched this 20 times on repeat
• My god did he get… schemed… open?
• Kevin Patullo’s brain would explode if he saw this
• Didn’t see anything remotely close during the Patullo dictatorship

Eagles fans were starved for some offensive creativity after last season’s vanilla party. Hopefully “four verticals” is in the garbage can with every hitch route a receiver can possibly run. If there’s a figurative tree with various hitch routes branching outward, the tree should be de-limbed and felled with a chainsaw. Then inserted into the wood chipper.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think these passing game updates are not the biggest offensive topic going into the 2026 season. I think it has to be the health of Landon Dickerson, Cam Jurgens, and Lane Johnson. For as much as the Eagles struggled at times to throw the ball in 2025, they couldn’t do what won them the Super Bowl the year prior. They couldn’t run the ball. Shouldn’t we be more excited about a new run blocking scheme and the return of the best offensive line in football?

You often ask yourself, “If (team X) is going to win it all, how is that going to happen? What does that look like?” And for me, that’s the Eagles running the football. It’s Saquon Barkley looking like 2024 Saquon. It’s the line staying healthy. It’s Jalen Hurts and the coaching staff remembering that he’s a dual-threat quarterback. If the passing game is effective on top of that, excellent, but it has to start on the ground and go from there.