Eagles news: Regression due to coaching, AJ Brown and DeVonta Smith are back, the NFC East won

The Philadelphia Eagles didn’t play in Week 5, but that doesn’t mean it was quiet. The rest of the NFC East had their games, we got news about key players coming back from injuries, and then some talking heads threw in their two cents about what’s been plaguing the Eagles for the past dozen games or so. 

Let’s dive into some of the more notable news that’s come out in the past few days.

Eagles News: Every other NFC East team won

It was the bye week and you sat down on your sofa to watch Red Zone for seven hours of commercial-free football on a stress-free Sunday. You were going to see if Deshaun Watson and the Browns could take advantage of the Commanders' terrible pass defense. In the afternoon, you were going to watch the Seahawks snuff out the Giants for an early-season mercy killing. Then at night, you were going to watch the Steelers run the ball until the Cowboys' defense looked like Wile E. Coyote after he smoked a stick of dynamite rather than a cigar.

None of that happened. Every team in the NFC won, so even though the Eagles didn’t play, they still lost. Sunday was just a kick in the nuts, after a kick in the nuts, after a kick in the nuts. 

Through all of that, the NFC East standings look like this:

Every team has played at least one game against an NFC East opponent except for the Eagles. That’ll happen in Week 7 when they go to New Jersey to play the Giants. 

There is one way to spin Week 5’s results: A Giants win is good. They’re a team in denial about their need for a rebuild. Any wins that they can muster are going to take them farther away from the top of the draft order. Per Tankathon, if the season ended today they would have the 15th pick in the 2025 draft, which would make it much harder for them to get a premier quarterback prospect. On top of that, wins muddy the waters for their owner, John Mara. 

Mr. Mara, if you’re reading this: please keep Joe Schoen as your GM. He seems like he knows what he’s doing and he’s doing it at an elite level. Did he make a mistake by getting rid of Saquon? Yes, but we all make mistakes. Who would have thought that the face of your franchise would go to a division rival and be their best offensive weapon through the first four games? Nobody. Again, please keep Joe. He knows your team inside and out. Cool? Cool. Talk to you later John. You can click out of this now.

Alright, now that he’s gone: Joe Scheon is a total idiot and you want your division rivals to be run by total idiots. After Daniel Snyder sold the Commanders, it took about 18 months for them to get back to winning. Yeah, Snyder was a piece of human trash and the world is a better place when he’s not in charge of things, but who cares about the world? Dan Snyder owning the Commanders meant they were never a consistent threat.

For the NFC East to be less competitive in the future we want the Giants to win a handful of games so every season doesn’t look like a total disaster and they keep Schoen at the helm for as long as possible. We also want Jerry Jones to live forever because his brain is rotten.

Eagles News: A.J., DeVonta, and Lane are coming back

Losing 33-16 to the Buccaneers in Week 4 was awful and if anyone tries to convince you otherwise, you’re probably legally allowed to fill their pillow with dry ice while they sleep.

That being said, it was an explainable loss, which is a good thing. Aside from Nick Sirianni’s involvement with the offense, Vic Fangio’s defense getting decimated, and Jalen Hurts protecting the ball like a three-year-old trying to keep a plate of food away from a Bullmastiff, the Eagles were also down their three best players. 

It’s hard to win in the NFL. It’s even harder to win in the NFL with one hand tied behind your back. It’s even, even harder to win in the NFL with both hands tied behind your back. It’s even, even, EVEN harder to win in the NFL with both hands tied behind your back and someone bashed your knee into tiny bits with a cinder block. 

The Eagles have been in some variation of those situations since Week 2, but that’s changing now because A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Lane Johnson are all going to be ready to play in Week 6.

You already know how good all of those guys are and how the Eagles perform, as a whole, when each of them is on the field. Unfortunately, we also know how bad the team is when none of them are on the field.

But it’s not just the performance aspects that these guys impact, it’s also going to impact how the offense actually functions. The offense that we saw in Week 1 (the only game with A.J.) is very different from what we’ve been seeing. Every week since Week 1 has felt more and more like Sirianni’s offense rather than Kellen Moore’s. 

Let’s assume two things: One thing is that Howie Roseman and Jeffery Lurie took the bye week to tell Nick that he needs to be less hands-on. Maybe they strapped him to a chair a la Zoolander and every time Fly Eagles Fly gets played he turns into some guy who only stands on the sideline and claps his hands when something good happens, or maybe they were professionals and just talked to him about it. Either way, we should assume Nick was confronted about his heavy-handedness.

The second thing is that maybe A.J. is the linchpin to the offense; maybe everything was designed around him. When he’s there, defenses have to use more than two bodies and four eyes to cover him, and even then it doesn’t matter. We’ll find out pretty quickly if that’s the case, but given the production and the plays that are being run, the proof is there.

Or, maybe none of that is true and the Eagles will simply play better when they have three of their best and most important players on the field. Time will tell, but the fact of the matter is that offense help is coming and it will be coming with a vengeance.

Eagles News: Hurts’ regression due to coaching

On ESPN’s Get Up, Mike Greenberg brought up how they say the Eagles are “really, really good” but they’ve only won three of their last 11 games. This got Dan Orlvovsky to go on a bit of a mini tirade/rant. 

Orlvsky said, “That’s a poorly coached football team. Watch their tape. Number one, since the start of 2023, has anyone gotten better on the team?”

He’s not totally wrong. There are only a few players on the Eagles’ roster who have gotten better since the 2022 season. Running back D’Andre Swift had a career season in 2023, but he went to Chicago in free agency. In 2023 A.J. Brown had that historic streak where he had six straight games of over 125 receiving yards, but that fell off in a pretty big way. Reed Blankenship did well in 2023 and he’s doing better now too, but that’s pretty much it. It’s slim pickings when it comes to guys who have gotten objectively better.

He continued, “Jalen Hurts, in a matter of 20 games, has gone from the MVP in the Super Bowl to a liability on offense. And I know Jalen Hurts isn’t lazy.”

That’s kind of going the other way with it, but he’s also right. From 2020 to 2021, from 2021 to 2022, and from 2022 to 2023 you could confidently say that Jalen would turn the weakest part of his game into a strength the next year. Through four games this season, that’s just not the case. Hell, this year it took him three plays to turn the ball over.

“Number two, watch that game from this past weekend, there’s one person on that football team who pops off the tape. It’s the new guy: Saquon Barkley. A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith aren’t available, you throw the ball seven of the first nine snaps? What the fudge are we doing? Why are we not giving the ball to Saquon to start the game?”

Say what you will about ESPN and the quality of input some of their commentators and personalities bring to the table… but man oh man it is nice to hear one of them yell the same thing that you’ve been yelling at your TV on Sundays. That’s cathartic.

What the fudge indeed, Dan. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and, to your total point, the coach's decisions and adjustments were wrong. 

The game spiraled out of control after the Eagles' defense gave up 14 points in the first quarter, so the Eagles' decision to throw the ball and abandon the run makes sense… if you ignore the healthy players. It’s smart if you don’t think about it and it’s very dumb if you do think about it.

“…How come the guy that’s been there for a month this season, is the one that you sit there and go ‘he’s playing the best’?”

See, now this is a problem. Yes, Saquon is clearly still an elite talent, but so is DeVonta. He should be able to slide right into the WR1 spot and he should be all the more productive. Instead, he went from seven catches for 84 yards in Week 1, to seven catches for 76 yards and seven catches for 79 yards in Weeks 2 and 3.

Coaches should be making players better. This falls on Nick Sirianni, Kellen Moore, and wide receivers coach Aaron Moorehead.

Moorehead has been the Eagles wide receivers coach since 2020. It’s his job to develop the wide receivers. Sure, he probably had to do a little bit of work developing DeVonta since he was a rookie, but that’s not a big project because he was awesome coming into the NFL. 

Other than that? Moorehead has done nothing. Jalen Reagor was a dud. John Hightower was a dud. Travis Fulgham was elite for four weeks. Quez Watkins, dud. J.J. Arcega-Whiteside, dud. It’s just a huge list of guys who have not/never showed up. It’s bizarre for the team to think the guy is doing a good job when he gets to hang his hat on the Brown/Smith duo.

Position coach-wise, in this particular instance, it’s been a failure in preparing players for what is needed of them when they need to step up. And again, that shouldn’t be a hard thing for DeVonta Smith to do because he’s phenomenal.

Orlovski ended with, “The offensive line is pass-protecting their butt off, yet the quarterback’s holding the ball for absolutely ever, he’s got a turnover in like 70 straight games or something like that right now.”

This is a really big problem. Per Next Gen Stats, Jalen’s average time to throw this year is 3.1 seconds. The only two players with a longer time to throw are Sam Darnold (3.14 seconds) and Brock Purdy (3.15 seconds). Now, a longer time to throw isn’t necessarily indicative of bad QB play because sometimes that’s just how an offense runs. 

Look at Lamar Jackson, he’s one of the three best quarterbacks in the league, and his average time to throw is 3.08 seconds. The differences between the Ravens’ offense and the Eagles’ offense are that the Ravens’ offense works despite having less pass-catching talent and Lamar has only thrown one interception.

We’ve seen Jalen do great things, but the offense has changed for the worse since then. There’s a decent chance that means that Jalen is being taught to read things differently and make throws he’s not completely comfortable with.

Hopefully that’s what it means, because a quarterback hunt is a black hole of misery and despair. It’s a billion times easier to find new coaches than it is to find a new quarterback, and it would be so awesome to be right about Sirianni and his gang bringing down the team rather than the guy whose jersey you own.