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Nick Sirianni Can Gain Even More Favor by Removing the Bubble Screen from the Eagles’ Playbook
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Not to go negative after a comprehensive Eagles road win, but the bubble screen reared its ugly head at the end of the second quarter in North Jersey:
— Kevin Kinkead (@Kevin_Kinkead) October 22, 2024
Do you think Nick Sirianni or Kellen Moore called this? They’ve got Jahan Dotson and Grant Calcaterra out there blocking for DeVonta Smith, so at least this wasn’t the abomination of the 3rd and 19 with 170-pound Smitty blocking for Kenny Gainwell last season. What a trip that was.
Not to go overboard here, but the bubble screen makes my blood boil. Makes me wanna jump off the top of Hawk Mountain without a parachute. Let’s just assume for a minute that Calcaterra doesn’t whiff on the block and that Smith catches the ball. He’s got maybe the slightest bit of room to use Dotson’s block to pick up 2-3 yards on the outside. Why? Because it’s a 3×3 perimeter toss to the field side and one of your players is the receiver, which means only two defenders are being blocked. You’re essentially setting up a 1v1 between the ball carrier and unblocked player and hoping that your guy can beat their guy or junk up his path in limited space, like this:
In DeVonta’s case, he’s shifty enough to knife through there and pick up some yards, skirt the outside and put Dotson and his assignment between him and the free guy, but the whole point of the bubble screen, or anything thrown to the perimeter, is to put your best athlete in space with the ball. In college, when you’re Chip Kelly’s Oregon or any of those quick-hitting Big 12 teams from 10 years ago, this often resulted in a talent advantage, not at the NFL level. This isn’t Dennis Dixon firing the ball sideways so some 5-star recruit can cook a 3-star recruit. Everyone in an NFL secondary was probably the best player on their college team, or one of several NFLers, so that advantage goes away.
To me, this felt like a designed target for Smith, who wasn’t involved and wasn’t getting the ball. If it was, that’s good, but there are better ways to get him targets. Jalen Hurts missed him on what looked like a couple of instances in this came, one an egregious 3rd and 3 across the middle that would have moved the chains. They threw a 40-some-yard bomb to A.J. Brown on the very next play for a TD, but it’s one of those things where it still feels like they’re failing to execute on these short crossers and trying some funky stuff for no particular reason, like this play and the Saquon Barkley Wildcat snap.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com