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The Eagles’ Offensive Line Remains the Biggest Problem
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Jalen Hurts was bad on Monday night, but he’s had good games this year.
The one unit that’s been consistently subpar is the offensive line, which has been banged up and underperforming from the jump. Landon Dickerson and Cam Jurgens haven’t been healthy since the Super Bowl. Jordan Mailata has had an objectively poor season, Lane Johnson has only played 450 snaps over 10 games, and Tyler Steen, while good in pass protection, isn’t the run game road grader that Mekhi Becton was at right guard.
You could probably start and end the story right there, with the caveat that these guys played a ton of games and logged a TON of run blocking snaps en route to a championship, but a telling snapshot of 2025 struggles flashed during the second half Saquon Barkley house call:
What do you see when you watch it back?
I see the best blocks being thrown by Darius Cooper and Dallas Goedert. Fred Johnson gets enough on Denzel Perryman that A.J. Brown can finish that block but Jordan Mailata gets away with a borderline hold on Khalil Mack, which FOX replayed 700 times coming out of the break. Joe Buck couldn’t hide his disgust that the Eagles got away with what would have been the second touchdown wiped out by a Mailata penalty.
But that’s two receivers, a tight end, and a backup RT springing a touchdown, off a tush push wrinkle, no less. They needed something quirky to finally break Saquon for a big one. He finished above 100 yards for only the second time this season, going for 122 yards and a score on 20 carries.
The law of averages being what it is, if you remove that big gain, Saquon’s night is 19 carries for 70 yards, or 3.68 on average. Not very good. Throw in Jalen Hurts and Tank Bigsby adding 12 yards on five carries and without the house call it’s 3.41 yards per carry, which included five stuffed rushing attempts. They’ve been stuffed 43 times this season when running the ball, which is third-most in the NFL. Compare it with last year, when they were stuffed only 50 times all year long despite running the ball at a higher volume than anybody and logging a 4.91 YPC.
This year, they’re down to 4.1 YPC and 11th-worst in the NFL.
Coincidentally, when you can’t establish the run, you pass the ball more, and sometimes when your QB is having a bad game you wind up throwing four interceptions and lose in overtime.
It starts with the offensive line, always. They haven’t been healthy and the guys who are healthy haven’t been very good.
editor’s night: an earlier version of this article called Becton a road “grater,” like he was grating cheese
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