3 bold predictions for Eagles vs. Panthers: Opening drive deep dive

The Philadelphia Eagles have made it to the easiest part of their schedule. Four of their last five games are at home and three of them are against bottom-10 teams. It all starts this week when the 3-9 Carolina Panthers come to Lincoln Financial Field.

They beat the Saints and the Giants, then took the Chiefs and the Buccaneers down to the wire over the past four weeks. They’re playing weirdly well, but they’re still a bottom-tier team with a bottom-tier roster.

The Eagles can remind the Panthers of who they really are

No one is going to be impressed by the Eagles beating the Panthers, and no one should be. It’s a football game between a really good team and a pretty bad team. The Eagles are the better team at almost every position on either side of the ball (Xavier Legette MIGHT be better than Tristan McCollum).

The Eagles can use this game to get healthy and do some things that they haven’t done this season. Think of it like a lesser version of a get-right game. The Eagles haven’t scored on their first drive of any game. Maybe they just need to see the ball go through the hoop …

Prediction: Saquon doesn’t break the Eagles’ single-season rushing record

Saquon only needs 109 yards to break the Eagles’ single-season rushing record set by LeSean McCoy in 2013 (1,607 yards), and the Panthers allow 166.8 rushing yards per game (the most in the league).

Sure, if the Eagles give Saquon his usual 20-ish rushes in the game, he’ll smash that number easily. The hope here is that Saquon only gets 10 rushes. Saquon is averaging 6.1 yards per carry, so 10 rushes would, in theory, put him at 61 yards.

That’s just theoretical though. A whole boatload of Saquon’s rushing yards come in the later parts of games. The idea here is that Saquon won’t be in the later part of the game because it’ll be out of control by the end of the third quarter and the Eagles will be able to pull offensive starters.

The tough part about this is that this would be a huge game for Saquon to be able to stat-pad. In 1984 Eric Dickerson set the NFL’s single-season rushing record at 2,105 yards. Saquon is on pace to hit 2,153 yards this season. With the way Josh Allen has been playing, it seems like Saquon will have to break Dickerson’s record to win the NFL MVP.

Saquon gets what's happening here: he’s special and he understands what he means to this offense. Yeah, it’d be sick if he broke that record and won the award, but the Eagles can win the Super Bowl and for that to happen, he’ll need to be on the field.

Maybe Saquon breaks the Eagles record on Sunday. All it would take is a few of those mondo runs that he gets disgustingly frequently. He can make the Panthers' defense look like one of those videos where a high school team lets a waterboy score a touchdown, hopefully, he gets the rest and doesn’t have to do that though.

He’ll break the record, but it’ll have to wait one more week.

Prediction: Quinyon Mitchell or Cooper DeJean gets their first interception

Bryce Young has been playing better; there’s no doubt about that. Unfortunately for him, he’s going to be playing against the best defense in the NFL. 

One thing that’s going to hurt him is going to be his addiction to throwing the ball in tight windows. A tight window throw is a pass where the receiver has less than one yard of separation when the ball gets to him, and Bryce throws the most tight window throws in the entire NFL. As a matter of fact, 21.4 percent of his passes are tight window throws.

That’s not completely his fault because his receivers aren’t exactly helping him out. His targets have the third smallest average separation, so he doesn’t exactly have a choice. 

If Bryce has the gall to throw a ball Quiyon’s way, Q will be in a decent position to yoink it. I threw Cooper DeJean in this prediction as well because it would only make sense for Quinyon to drop as many interceptions as he has, only for Coop to snag the first one he gets the chance to.

Prediction: The Eagles get a touchdown on their first drive

The Bears, the Cowboys, the Jaguars, and the Eagles are four teams who have not scored on their first drive of any game this season. That’s not the company that you want to be in.

The inability to start fast is a pretty big issue, and it’s something that’s clearly been getting to offensive coordinator Kellen Moore. During his press conference on Wednesday, he was asked about the slow starts and the scripted plays. Kellen said:

“We’ve navigated this thing in a lot of different ways. We’ve talked about it, we’ll talk about it again this week as far as trying to find the best way for us to execute. In LA it felt like we had a good drive going, ended up short in the red zone. This past week, one first down and then kind of got stalled out. It’s a frustrating aspect of our thing and we’ll keep working.” (2:39 in the video below)

If there’s going to be one knock on Kellen during the coach-hiring cycle this offseason, it’s going to be the slow starts. He only gave two examples there, but it’s been every single week. There have only been two games where the opening drives have ended in field goals; that’s not great.

“We’ve had a lot of discussions about it. Just different ways that we can attack the defense, play to our strengths. Kind of focus on us, and then make the adjustments as the game goes... We’ve started slow, unfortunately, for too many games and it’s something we’ve got to do a better job of.”

This isn’t the first that we’ve heard about these discussions. In a press conference before the Giants game in Week 7, Sirianni was talking about them too, “...we just got to keep trying different formulas of things that have been successful in the past, things that we think can be successful for this team. Again, just sprinkling different formulas in there because we know how important it is that we get on the board first.”

The results haven’t changed no matter how much the coaches have tinkered and fiddled around with the opening script, and to be fair, they’ve done a good bit of that tinkering and fiddling. 

All of the information below is coming from ESPN’s play-by-play page, and here are some interesting things when you dive into it.

Of the Eagles' 12 opening drives, there have been four three-and-outs. Of the remaining eight drives, only three of them have multiple first downs. Uncoincidentally, those three multiple-first-down drives are the three drives the Eagles have attempted a field goal.

Through the 12 games, the Eagles have run 69 plays in their opening drives. That number includes plays with penalties that happen during the play, like holding, and not plays blown dead by a false start. The Eagles have failed to convert after they get an offensive penalty, which is a big problem. 

In those 69 plays, there have been 36 passes and 33 runs. Saquon has gotten the ball on 22 of those runs, Kenny Gainwell has three, Will Shipley has one, and Jalen Hurts has seven.

Of the 36 passes, A.J. Brown has been targeted 10 times, Dallas Goedert five times, Grant Calcaterra twice, Saquon three times, Britain Covey three times, Jahan Dotson once, DeVonta Smith only once, and there have been four sacks (a few passes just say that they were incomplete with no target).

Now, keep in mind Goedert, Brown, and Smith have all missed a handful of games … but even with that, you would think those three should get the ball thrown to them more than a combined 16 times. Of those 16 passes, seven of them have gone for first downs. 

That’s just 44 percent of the passes on opening drives going to dominant pass catchers and 43 percent of those passes are going for first downs. So, yes, the Eagles are trying different things on opening drives, but they’re not working. It’s probably a good idea to just do a ‘meat and potatoes’ passing game and hit the really good guys … you know, rather than Britain Covey twice in one drive. 

It would be really funny if Kellen or Nick pulled a Vic Fangio and just said, “I don’t know. You got any ideas?” just to go along with the bit. Right now, watching the offense in the first quarter is a fruitless endeavor. If they decided to crowdsource the scripted plays, it’d actually be fun.