Even during the Eagles’ 4-0 start to the season, it was clear that something was wrong. They were winning, but it looked and felt like a struggle. The numbers weren’t great. The games were too close. And things just looked … off.
So it wasn’t really a surprise to them the way things unraveled over the past two weeks, first with a loss at home to the tough Denver Broncos, and then an inexcusable road loss to the Giants. The Eagles could see it coming. They knew they had problems.
They’re just not completely sure what those problems are.
“We’re just not very good right now,” right tackle Lane Johnson said after Philadelphia’s 34-17 loss to the Giants in Week 6. “We were winning, but we weren’t dominating. It’s frustrating.”
Added receiver A.J. Brown: “We’re still trying to find our identity. I think that’s safe to say.”
Eagles receiver A.J. Brown walks off the field dejected during Philadelphia’s Week 6 loss to the Giants at MetLife Stadium. (Photo by Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images)
It is actually impossible to define this version of the Eagles, just eight months after they won their second Super Bowl in the past eight seasons. They powered their way through the playoffs last season with a dominant defense and an offense that rode Saquon Barkley and the NFL’s second-best rushing attack. They were bullies — the toughest, most resilient team in the league.
This season, not so much. Their defense, battered by injuries, ranks in the bottom third in the league. Their running game ranks even lower. Barkley, one year after rushing for 2,005 yards in 16 games, is on pace for just 921. Jalen Hurts leads the fourth-worst passing attack in the league, averaging just 179.2 yards per game. And his No. 1 receiver, Brown, has become an afterthought in the offense and is on his way to a 71-catch, 776-yard season, which would be by far the worst of his career.
Johnson thinks the offense has become “predictable.” Barkley disagrees. And new offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo doesn’t seem to have any answers at all. Meanwhile, the defense is being uncharacteristically “out-physicaled” in the words of corner Cooper DeJean, though defensive coordinator Vic Fangio disagrees.
The Eagles may be 4-2 and still in first place in the NFC East, but from top to bottom they look and feel like a mess.
“You just got to fix the things that you’re struggling with,” Brown said. “We have to learn from losing. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s easier to learn from winning, because you feel OK about it. This stings.
“If it stings bad enough, things will change.”
The two-game losing streak is reminiscent of what the Eagles experienced at the end of 2023, when they lost six of their last seven games — including one in the playoffs — ruining a season that began with a 10-1 start. The good news this time is they still have 11 games to figure out what’s gone wrong.
The bad news is they can’t seem to agree on exactly what that is.
Take the offense, which seems to be their biggest problem. They are loaded with talent, including Hurts, Brown, Barkley, receiver DeVonta Smith and a deep and talented offensive line. But there is already griping about the direction they’re headed under Patullo, the former passing game coordinator who was promoted to replace the departed Kellen Moore.
“You can game plan all you want. But when you get in the game, a lot of it is making adjustments,” Johnson said. “We’re not efficient in anything. The last two weeks, you kind of know what it is. You know when the pass is coming, you know when the run is coming. Moving forward, we’ve got to do a better job of that.”
Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni promoted passing game coordinator Kevin Patullo to OC this season, but so far the Philadelphia offense has regressed. (Photo by Cooper Neill/Getty Images)
That sounded like a huge indictment of Patullo and his scheme, and a huge problem for head coach Nick Sirianni, who hasn’t always had a stellar record in choosing his coordinators. But not everyone agreed with Johnson’s assessment. Barkley, in fact, sounded almost angry when he fired back.
“Last year, do you think we were predictable?” he said. “Everybody knew we were going to run the ball. We still got it off.
“Football is a lot simpler than what you think. You have a foundation of plays that you run, and if you run them enough, they’re going to have an idea of what is coming. But we have to do a better job of executing on those plays. I don’t get into ‘It’s predictable’ or pointing fingers. I think K.P. (Patullo) is doing a hell of a job, but we all have to be better, and that’s just the truth.
“If anybody else thinks anything different they have to wake up.”
With 2,005 yards last season, Saquon Barkley out-rushed 20 NFL teams by himself. This year, he’s on pace for fewer than 1,000 rushing yards.
It’s hard to tell whether words like that are the sign of dysfunction or just frustration. It’s the same when trying to interpret Brown’s social media posts, when he seemed to indicate his unhappiness with his role after a win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Week 4, when the Eagles were 4-0.
Brown, Barkley and Hurts are, undoubtedly, having statistically terrible seasons for them. It’s why a few days after their loss to the Broncos, they had a lengthy talk about what’s gone wrong with the offense.
But whatever conclusions they reached, they still had no answers against the Giants. Hurts threw for 283 yards, but the offense didn’t score a point in the second half. Brown had six catches for 80 yards, but only one 7-yard catch after halftime. Barkley ran for only 58 yards against his old team. And the offense totaled just 115 second-half yards as the Giants pulled away.
“If you watch around the league, there’s a lot of teams that are kind of still finding their way,” Patullo said. “And I think that’s kind of where we’re at.”
“What game is it? Game 6?” Brown added. “I think sometimes it just takes longer than we expected. I think we’re just trying to figure things out.”
The use of Barkley certainly has been the most confounding part of the Eagles’ first six games. In some sense, a regression was expected after he touched the ball 482 times last season (for a total of 2,857 yards) — 105 touches more than his previous high.
But it’s not just that his yards-per-carry has been nearly cut in half — from 5.8 a year ago to 3.4 through the first six games this season — it’s that there are stretches where the Eagles seem to forget he’s there. He had just six carries in the loss to Denver (for 30 yards), including just one in the second half. In the Eagles’ two losses, he’s touched the ball just a total of 23 times.
“I would like to increase it, obviously,” Patullo admitted. “Some of that is those RPO plays (run-pass option) that we run where sometimes the run is called, then the ball gets pulled and thrown. And they’ve been successful. But yes, we need to continue to grow in that area.”
Of course, it’s not just about Barkley and the possibly predictable offense. The defense has been a mess, too. The Eagles knew they’d have some issues, after losing cornerback Darius Slay, safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson and defensive linemen Josh Sweat, Milton Williams and Brandon Graham in the offseason. And since then, they’ve also been hit by injuries to defensive tackle Jalen Carter, cornerback Quinyon Mitchell and linebackers Nolan Smith and Nakobe Dean.
But their fall has still been startling. A year ago they were the NFL’s No. 1 defense, giving up just 278.4 yards per game. This year they rank 21st, giving up 342.8. The Giants, one of the most offensively challenged teams in the league and now led by a rookie quarterback, ripped through the Eagles for 336 yards and 34 points. The Giants even ran for 172 yards and held the ball for the final 6:50 of the game.
Once the bullies, the Eagles were bullied in that game, and it’s not the first time that’s happened this year.
“We talk about it all the time,” DeJean said. “But we got to go out there and be about it and do it on the field. [The Giants] out-physicaled us in moments. That’s simply not us. That’s not our model of soccer, and we received to repair that.”
Fangio, a defensive guru with a long time of NFL expertise, didn’t just like the characterization that his unit received pushed round.
“I do not know if that was true,” he stated. “It definitely was on the final drive. However we simply did not rush properly sufficient. We had a tough time with the quarterback, clearly. We had a tough time protecting, and my calls weren’t adequate to cowl up these.”
And but, regardless of all that, all is just not misplaced — not even shut. The Eagles are so loaded with expertise they’re nonetheless an excellent guess to win their division, make the playoffs, and even make a run to their second straight Tremendous Bowl — if they’ll discover a option to flip issues round.
In some methods, they’re too good, too loaded, to fail. After all, that’s the way in which they felt in 2023, once they had been 10-1 and didn’t fairly really feel like all the pieces was working even earlier than their season-crushing collapse. As soon as once more, they’re having bother sustaining their customary of greatness in back-to-back years.
And so they can’t appear to agree on why.
“I do know that we dwell in a world that wishes to assign blame, level the finger,” Sirianni stated. “However that is not the fact of what good groups do. That is not the fact of this sport.”
Star linebacker Zack Baun put it extra bluntly: “We wanted a actuality examine then. Possibly that’s what we’d like now.”
Ralph Vacchiano is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports activities. He spent six years protecting the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and earlier than that, 16 years protecting the Giants and the NFL for the New York Every day Information. Observe him on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.
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