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Sad Collapse – 34 Immediate Observations from Rams 24, Eagles 20
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Well, that was certainly a game of football. Two teams got together to play some bad offense and commit a lot of penalties and make a lot of mistakes. The result was an Eagles choke job and a 24-20 loss.
They really had no business dropping that game. Yeah, they were missing some key pieces. Yeah, more guys left the game with injury. But all they needed was one scoring drive in the second half. One stupid score, and instead they went punt/punt/downs/downs/punt/downs to end the game. They mustered 172 total yards of offense, went 0-12 on third down, and couldn’t put away a Rams team that turned the ball over twice and committed 100 yards worth of penalties.
To the observations we go, with the Eagles at 2-2.
1) Didn’t have a great feeling about this game when it was reported by T Mac that DeVonta Smith would be out. Dallas Goedert was already out. Then Lane Johnson was ruled out with Zack Baun, Fred Johnson, and Marcus Epps, and that’s when I went to Kalshi to put $25 on the Rams. Not betting against my team, but placing an emotional hedge. You can also emotional hedge with a Kalshi promo code!
2) Because of Johnson’s late absence, the Birds only dressed 47 players for the game. Only seven active offensive linemen to work with.
3) Second play of the game, and some foreshadowing of what was to come:
4) “Jalen needs to play with some anticipation.” I agree with Tom Brady! Sick of seeing him run backwards and to his right to either throw the ball out of bounds or run out at the line of scrimmage. You knew you didn’t have Smitty going into this game, so you just have to trust the guys available and throw them the ball. Let it rip.
5) First Eagles takeaway of the season with the Drew Mukuba pick. Good bit of pressure from Jonathan Greenard to put Matt Stafford off. Yay!
6) Saquon Barkley did his hammy on the first drive. Bummer. Nobody expected another 2,000-yard season from him, but he was averaging 5.1 YPC coming into this game and starting to show some flashes of 2024.
7) The Birds had to settle for a field goal after the first Rams turnover. It was good to see a designed Hurts run on 2nd down, which went for decent yardage. But they ran a sweep with Tank Bigsby going left on 3rd and 2 and it was blown up entirely. Even if they went downhill there and got a yard, they could have shoved on 4th and maybe gotten seven points out of that drive.
8) Hell of a catch from Puka Nacua on that third down. Brady said that Riq Woolen couldn’t keep up with the quickness, but Woolen jarred the ball loose and made a really good play. Maybe Brady temporarily went blind during that sequence. Good throw by Stafford, too, with two Eagles linebackers coming on a double A-gap blitz.
9) Davante Adams dropped that touchdown pass? Not expected!
10) Anybody else think Makai Lemon looks like the 5th member of Bone Thugs? I think you could slide him right into the group photo and it would be perfect:
11) Lemon caught a pass that wasn’t a screen! Took a big hit, too, but held on for a first down. Then he caught another big one on 4th and 2 to move the sticks again.
12) The Birds worked really hard for a 56-yard field goal on the third drive. The Johnny Mundt holding call was rough, but Hurts taking that third down sack forced Jake Elliott back to midfield. You knew it was gonna be a tough NFL debut for Markel Bell, but he managed to block 0 of the 3 guys coming at the quarterback.
13) Not sure about you, but that Zach Ertz target on that drive – the refs from last weeks game would have called that illegal contact on the Eagles defense. You were thinking that, right?
14) Great play Moro Ojomo! The stuff! He needed that after that bonehead sequence last week, the neutral zone infraction. (by the way, wonderful open-field tackle from Woolen on the play before to set up 3rd and short)
15) That 3rd and 14 to end the fourth drive was pretty brutal. It’s cover 0, Rams sending the house. Where’s the hot route? Not a single pass catcher had their head turned by the time Hurts was trying to evade 17 guys in the backfield:
16) Britain Covey! Killer return. That was so cool to see considering that Covey usually ends each return by getting smoked. Josiah Deguara clobbered some dude from the side, who thought it was an illegal block. But no flag from the refs there. Totally wiped that guy out.
17) Moss’d him. This angle is the best:
18) Rams went 67 yards in nine plays to score before halftime. 3:49 off the clock. Honestly, Stafford made some really good throws on that drive. Quinyon Mitchell and Jalyx Hunt had good coverage on Adams and Tyler Higbee. Think you have to tip your hat to the LA offense on that one. They made some big plays.
19) That was a tough DPI call on the Rams right before halftime. I don’t know, man. We’d be going crazy if that was called against the Eagles. It looked like Trent McDuffie got the slightest bit of the pants before his hand got stuck in Dontayvion Wicks’ jersey.
20) Cooper is a legitimate red zone target. 5’11”, 210 pounds, largest receiver they have in the post-A.J. Brown era. With Goedert out, no Smitty, etc, someone’s gotta catch the red zone passes. Really nice to see him get a couple of touchdowns after the last couple of preseasons he’s had.
21) What do you think would have happened in this game if Myles Garrett and Aaron Donald were out there?
22) 3rd and 5… Stafford just barely misses Adams again? Sheesh. Thought that one was going for a touchdown. It was hard to tell on TV just how hard the rain was coming down.
23) Timely sack from Nolan Smith because LA was moving on that drive. They were snapping the ball faster and using some tempo and making some catches. Then they missed the field goal with a Shank-o-potamus and failed to put points on the board.
24) Saquon Barkley, Quinyon Mitchell, and Jonathan Greenard all left this game with injuries. Cooper DeJean left and came back. Tank Bigsby went down in the 4th quarter.
25) Dumbest penalty of the game is on the Rams coach for standing on the white and bumping into the official. Can’t believe you get 15 yards for that. They need to hire one of those guys whose entire job is to just hold the coaches and players back from the field.
26) It was late in the third quarter when I said to myself, “the Rams don’t want to win this game.” They had just gone penalty/penalty/drop/wormburner. Ridiculous sequence for them. Then the Eagles didn’t know what they were doing on 3rd and 3 and somehow handed the ball off to Will Shipley to set up 4th and 1 and a failed tush push with Willie Lampkin pushing the pile.
Neither team really wanted to win the game:
27) TERRIBLE blindside block call on Nacua. Refs were atrocious (as usual).
28) Incredible how bad the Eagles are in the third quarter this year. We may just need to go outside and take a long smoke break for every third quarter, then come back to the TV when the 4th begins.
29) They did not throw the Makai Lemon bubble screen. That’s good. But they did throw a pop screen to Wicks, who picked up five yards. That looked like it was going nowhere before Wicks made something out of it.
30) Wasted red zone possession to start the fourth. Sequence of the game, honestly. They ran Shipley twice to set up 3rd and goal from the 2. Then Hurts bobbled a snap and had to run an improv bootleg that got back to the line of scrimmage. That was followed up with an ugly-looking second-option throw for Cooper that fell incomplete.
If they kick the field goal there, they go up 13. If they score, they go up 17 and basically kill off the game. This is going to debated all week, but I think it was an okay call to go and try to end it, because we all figured the defense would not roll over and die to the tune of 98 yards on the next possession (go figure). They did show Nick Sirianni thinking about calling a timeout, but the ball was snapped before it happened.
31) Jon Jones on that sideline penalty:
32) Refs did get it right on the Woolen DPI at the end of the fourth. Woolen had Nacua’s right hand pinned down for a time, even if the contact wasn’t much.
33) I liked Brady telling everyone that the Jihaad Campbell and Matt Stafford play wasn’t a penalty. Let ’em play. He clearly held up as Stafford was going out.
34) Jeremiah Trotter, Jalyx Hunt, and Michael Carter all had a shot at Kyren Williams at the end there and didn’t bring him down. Bummer because the defense played a pretty good game overall and just ran out of steam at the end. They needed one more stop to bail out the offense and couldn’t do it.
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