Eagles

Doug Pederson Answers Kamu Grugier-Hill Injury and Snap Count Questions

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Dec 18th, 2019 · 11:09 AM EST

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Was Doug Pederson fibbing on Monday? Did he present us with fake news?

The Eagles head ball coach said Kamu Grugier-Hill was limited in action because of the Redskins’ offensive personnel and scheme, then 48 hours later we learned that Grugier-Hill was placed on injured reserve with a herniated disc in his back.

Said Doug on Wednesday, about an hour after the Birds made the news official:

He felt discomfort after the game. Reported it, got an MRI on Monday, and it revealed that he needs to be shut down a little while. A statement came out, obviously, with where he’s at and what he’s gonna do. We’ll go from there.

Grugier-Hill’s five snaps were a season low. Was there any connection to the injury?

Pederson answered that with this:

The injury came after the game. The fact is that the Redskin offense and the amount of 11 personnel offense they were in in that game sort of dictated to us what personnel group we were gonna be in.

11 personnel is when an offense lines up with one running back, one tight end, and three receivers, which is a common sight in the NFL. As such, defenses facing that would likely be sitting in nickel or dime, with an extra corner or two on the field with just a pair of linebackers out there. The Eagles typically spend more time in nickel, with an extra corner on the field, than actually playing their base 4-3 defense.

To Doug’s point, this is how the LB snaps played out on Sunday:

•  52 snaps: Nigel Bradham
•  39 snaps: Nate Gerry
•  8 snaps: T.J. Edwards
•  6 snaps: Duke Riley
•  5 snaps: Kamu Grugier-Hill

A little later in the presser, Jeff McLane asked straight up if there was a correlation to Grugier-Hill’s unreported concussion and the handling of his back injury, to which Doug said:

“That’s speculation. I’m not gonna answer that. That’s speculation. I don’t get into that, hypotheticals.

So going back to Monday, for reference, here’s what Pederson said about Grugier-Hill and his lack of snaps:

Q. In LB Kamu Grugier-Hill’s case, his snaps were down. Was that related to the concussion or was it performance-related? (Zach Berman)

DOUG PEDERSON: No. I think, one, the structure of the offense, and then also, T.J. Edwards has been playing well, too, when he’s getting some opportunities. So there’s a little bit of that. So keeping all those guys as fresh as possible, plus they are all playing special teams, so just keeping everybody as fresh as we can.

Q. With Kamu, he had been playing a lot of snaps up until… (Jeff McLane)

DOUG PEDERSON: T.J. has been doing really well. Obviously Nate has been doing well. We’re getting Nigel back here the last couple games. There’s three, four guys that have been playing more snaps.

And that was basically corroborated by Jim Schwartz, who said this on Tuesday at his weekly press conference:

Q. Why didn’t LB Kamu Grugier-Hill play very much? (Dave Zangaro)

JIM SCHWARTZ: They ran a lot of big personnel in there and we had a little different lineup in the big personnel, so I think that took a little bit of his snaps away. And then on third-down we were a lot of dime personnel. Just sort of the way that they had played and then our matchups against it.

Q. So it wasn’t any disciplinary thing? (Dave Zangaro)

JIM SCHWARTZ: No.

There’s your explanation for that, so we can take all of that into account and then do speculation from there, if you’re not buying it. There will be some conspiracy theories on social media, no doubt.

Pederson also said today that he doesn’t know whether Grugier-Hill had been playing with the back issue. He expects T.J. Edwards to get some more time.

Here’s the full presser from Doug today, and the McLane part is around 3:00 –

Watch live as head coach Doug Pederson meets with the media. https://t.co/CpqOQcs5Pd

— Philadelphia Eagles (@Eagles) December 18, 2019