Kevin Patullo says Eagles are trending in the right direction to tune up their passing game

Kevin Patullo has been in this situation before, in the early stages of developing an offensive identity that remains a work in progress, especially in the passing game.

By this time last year, Jalen Hurts had thrown three interceptions. He’d lost a fumble. Hurts’ 60.7% expected completion percentage ranked 30th in the league, partially because of the low-percentage throws he was attempting to A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith.

One Super Bowl ring later, it’s safe to say that an offense in the first two weeks of the season won’t look the same by the end of the season. Two days after the Eagles’ narrow victory over the Kansas City Chiefs, in which Hurts threw for only 101 yards and seldom pushed the ball downfield for a second straight week, Patullo emphasized that the offense still is coming together.

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“I think even if you go back to last year and years past, you want the offense to trend in the right direction,” he said Tuesday. “And that direction is at the end of the season. That’s where you want to peak it out. So, really, as long as we continue to go through what we’re going through and winning games and finding ways to win, at some point during the year, we’ll say, ‘Oh, we went through that. And here’s how we fix that and here’s how we solve it.’

“So I think it’s an important thing that we go through it now rather than later and we continue to trend in the right direction.”

Patullo, the Eagles’ first-time offensive coordinator after four seasons as their passing game coordinator, is navigating the fine line between the need to create explosive plays in the passing game and the importance of protecting the football. Through two weeks, the Eagles have struggled to achieve the former and excelled at the latter. Hurts completed just one pass beyond 10 air yards against the Chiefs (a 28-yarder to Smith), just like he did in Week 1 against the Dallas Cowboys (a 51-yard pass to Jahan Dotson).

But with the likes of Hurts, Smith, and Brown (and Dallas Goedert when he isn’t injured), should the Eagles try to force the ball down the field? In a tight game against the Chiefs, Patullo said he could sense that “any mistake was going to be one of those things that got you the win.”

It seemed Patullo was trying to be aggressive early in the contest before he reverted to a more conservative approach. On the first play of the game, Brown was wide-open on a vertical route, but tight end Grant Calcaterra whiffed on his block off the edge, and the play essentially was over with Hurts under pressure.

“Sometimes, in-game, it just doesn’t happen,” Patullo said of the downfield passes. “It’s definitely something we want to do. It’s not something we’re avoiding. I know going forward, we have the plan in place. If it comes up, it’ll definitely happen.”

But it isn’t just the deep shots that are lacking in the Eagles’ passing game. According to Pro Football Focus, Hurts is the only quarterback in the league (besides Pittsburgh Steelers backup Mason Rudolph, who has just two dropbacks) who has not attempted an intermediate pass (between 10 and 19 yards) this season.

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Patullo chalked that up in part to the Chiefs’ heavy blitz on Sunday. Steve Spagnuolo blitzed Hurts on 64% of his dropbacks, according to Next Gen Stats, which was the highest single-game rate in the defensive coordinator’s history in Kansas City since he was hired in 2019. Hurts got the ball out quickly (2.11 seconds on average) to nearby targets, aside from the deep shot to Smith, which came against a zero blitz.

Two weeks into the season, is the Eagles offense becoming too predictable, based on Hurts’ pre-snap alignment?

The numbers suggest it is. When Hurts is under center, the Eagles have run the ball on a league-high 95.8% of plays, according to Next Gen Stats. They’re also very likely to run out of pistol formation (84.6%, which also ranks in the top 10).

The Eagles also run out of the shotgun more than most teams (33.8%, which ranks No. 5 in the league). Patullo noted that those trends are on his mind as he prepares for the Los Angeles Rams this week.

“We get all those numbers and you try to counteract those coming in,” Patullo said. “Sometimes, situationally, the plays pop up where you’re just not able to do that. But it’s definitely on our mind, as far as when you plan those things. You always want to make sure, ‘Oh, I have a tendency I can break.’ Definitely need to do that this week.”

When does it make sense for the Eagles to break a tendency? Patullo said it depends on multiple factors, but it ultimately comes down to the flow of the game.

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“You can do that early in the game,” he said. “You can do it late in the game. It can pop up whenever. It just depends on what you’re featuring that day. Like, what’s working. So if something’s working, it may come up, it may not. You may go into a game and say, ‘Hey, this is the play we’ve got to break the tendency with,’ but then it never occurs, because it’s not that kind of game for it.

“So it’s a little bit of a back-and-forth guessing game in-game. Sometimes it appears. Sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe it’s a week from now. It doesn’t have to be that game right away sometimes.”

Jalen Carter returned to action against the Chiefs following his Week 1 ejection, but not in the way Vic Fangio would have liked.

Fangio said Carter “needs to round into better shape” as the season gets underway. The Pro Bowl defensive tackle missed time in training camp with a shoulder injury, which reduced his overall reps in practice. Fangio also lamented the team’s shorter practices in general, a repeated sticking point for the veteran defensive coordinator.

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Still, Fangio said that Carter had “some good rushes,” despite the current state of his conditioning and his lack of practice reps.

“Both he and I talked about that, and he readily admits that,” Fangio said. “I think we’ll even get more [good rushes]. But I thought for everything that has gone on in his world, I thought he played pretty good.”

Carter played 48 defensive snaps on Sunday (80%) and finished the game with two tackles, including one for a loss, and three quarterback hits.