What, exactly, do the Eagles do well? A crucial question as injuries mount and London calls
Nick Sirianni's team lacks an area of true expertise right now, and stopping this worrying mini-slide depends on them locating it.
Every great team needs a thing.
It needs a thing it can do better than anything else.
What is that thing for the Eagles?
Where should they turn when nothing is working? When the injuries accumulate? When the score tightens? When the offense as a whole looks lost?
There are lots of things that might explain the Eagles’ 24-20 loss to the Rams on Sunday. At the top of the list is this:
The Rams had their thing. The Eagles did not.
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Before we tackle the daunting question of what that thing is, or what it should be, or what it could be eventually, or whether such a thing even exists, let’s remind ourselves of what it looks like. The Rams’ thing was Matthew Stafford throwing the ball to Puka Nacua, regardless of the coverage.
The veteran quarterback did it six times in the final eight minutes of play. Those plays resulted in 80 of the 177 yards the Rams would travel on their two touchdown drives that erased a 20-10 Eagles lead. They included catches of 32, 16, 12, nine, and seven yards, as well as a four-yard pass interference penalty. They were the driving forces behind Kyren Williams’ one-yard touchdown run with 3 minutes, 59 seconds remaining that cut the Eagles lead to 20-17 and Williams’ seven-yard touchdown run with 1:10 left that gave the Rams the lead for good.
It was who the Rams are. It was what they do.
The question: who are the Eagles?
“We know our formula of how we need to do that within the week and we have to trust that even though sometimes growth feels invisible, you’ve got to trust and keep putting the work in,” head coach Nick Sirianni said.
Those words might come across as maddeningly upbeat, but Sirianni was nothing of the sort in his postgame news conference. His body language suggested a man who understands his team is falling well short of its standard.
Injuries are a factor. But only to an extent. The Eagles had to scramble to adjust for the absence of All-Pro right tackle Lane Johnson, who missed the game for what the team is calling a personal matter. Sirianni declined to offer any further detail. They were already without wide receiver DeVonta Smith, who could miss multiple weeks with a hamstring injury. The absence of Johnson left them with three players in foreign positions: Cam Jurgens, filling in for injured guard Landon Dickerson; Drew Kendall, filling in for Jurgens at center, and rookie Markel Bell, making his first NFL start. Compounding matters was the hamstring injury that Saquon Barkley suffered early in the game on Sunday (backup Tank Bigsby later left the game).
» READ MORE: Eagles grades vs. Rams: Jalen Hurts and the offense struggle as Eagles collapse late
“You could ask me that question if we had 30 guys down,” Sirianni said. “I’m never going to use anything as an excuse. We have to look at ourselves in the mirror. We have to pick ourselves back up and you have to do ... Life hands you a lot of different scenarios. Football hands you a lot of different scenarios. You’ve got to be accountable to who you are and to what you do, each and every one of us. You’ll never hear me say a word about an injury. I have a lot of faith in everybody on this football team. There’s a reason they’re Philadelphia Eagles. I’ve got to do a better job. We’ve got to play better. We’ve got to coach better. All of us have things to get better from. I don’t care who’s on the field.”
On the defensive side, All-Pro cornerback Quinyon Mitchell left the game with a knee injury, while defensive end Jonathan Greenard left with an ankle injury. The Eagles were already playing without star linebacker Zack Baun.
“Obviously, you want your best players on the field,” said cornerback Cooper DeJean, who had one of the Eagles’ two interceptions and also was briefly shaken up himself. “It’s tough when they’re not out there. ... You just have to move on and hope those guys get healthy. But the next guys have to be ready.”
The Eagles are living life as a lot of NFL teams know it. It is an alternate universe compared to the one they enjoyed in 2024, when a dominant and healthy offensive line was backed by a defense that largely avoided the injury report. This was a week where the Eagles needed to find a way to basic competence. The search came up empty.
The Rams couldn’t do anything right. By halftime, they’d allowed more return yards on punts and interceptions than they had total yards of offense. But they had a place to which they could turn.
Stafford played a jarringly bad game of quarterback on Sunday. All is not well for the now 2-2 Rams. It is difficult for a passer’s feet to be concurrently happy and flat, but Stafford achieved the feat on several different drop backs. Is that a Vic Fangio thing? It might be. Fangio entered the day 3-0 against Stafford, Sean McVay and the Rams in his first two seasons in Philly.
A year ago, the Eagles held Stafford to 19-of-33 passing for 196 yards and an interception in a come-from-behind 33-26 win at Lincoln Financial Field. On Sunday, he was even worse. Both of his interceptions came on awful overthrows in dangerous parts of the field. One led to an Eagles field goal. The other led to an Eagles touchdown. For three-and-a-half quarters, Fangio could claim perhaps his most decisive victory yet.
Then again, maybe the Rams will ultimately go down as the NFL’s paper-est of tigers since the 2012 Eagles Dream Team. In Week 4, Stafford didn’t look all that much different than he did in the Rams’ season-opening loss to the 49ers. Is playing a 1 p.m. East Coast game the same as flying to Australia two days before kickoff? It sure looked like it.
These are the sorts of questions that animate an NFL season. Every week adds another game to the sample by which a team is ultimately judged. One thing you could say about the Rams this week: they had something to fall back on.
Have the Eagles had such a thing all season?
They sure haven’t had it like they’ve had it in the past.
In 2022, their thing was Jalen Hurts scrambling like everyone else on the field was moving at a slower speed. We have seen flashes of the player we saw when he almost single-handedly led the Eagles to an upset over the Chiefs. We saw it most vividly two weeks ago during the game-winning drive that he engineered against the Titans. It has been a while since we have consistently seen that player. That doesn’t mean he is a bad quarterback, or the wrong quarterback for this team. It just means that the Eagles can’t lean on Hurts, which is what they’ve needed to do these first four weeks.
In 2024, the thing was Saquon Barkley, the offensive line, and a running game that was as unstoppable as continental drift.
Before this season, A.J. Brown qualified as a thing.
Brown is gone. Jury is out on the run game.
“This offense can’t keep relying on Jalen to bail us out on third down,” left tackle Jordan Mailata said.
» READ MORE: Eagles’ Jalen Hurts blames offensive woes vs. Rams on ‘poor execution’
That was clear against the Rams. The Eagles were 0-for-12 on third down. They gained just 12 first downs total. The Rams had 26. Those two interceptions that Stafford threw left the Eagles needing to gain just 52 yards to score 10 points. At no point did they look capable of gaining much more than that. It is a problem, and a big one, and they are lucky they will try to solve it at 2-2 rather than 1-3.
They need to figure out what they do the best. Then, they need to do it better.
Just a few months ago, when Eagles training camp got underway, the defense drew rave reviews. The prevailing sentiment was that the unit was poised to dominate this year. So far through three games, Vic Fangio’s group has done anything but. From the lack of forced turnovers to missed coverage assignments, the Eagles have plenty of room for improvement. Can Fangio work his magic to get the defense on track in time for this week’s showdown with the high-powered LA Rams? The Inquirer’s Jeff McLane puts the defense under the microscope, and also answers listener questions in this week’s mailbag. Listen here.
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