Eagles News: Weaknesses of good teams, Greg Olsen catches heat, and another flexed game

We’re going into Week 17 and 13 of the NFL’s 32 teams are officially eliminated from the postseason. The Philadelphia Eagles are not one of those teams. They’re quite the opposite; they’re one of the five or six teams that is actually a Super Bowl contender.

Because of that, more eyes and ears are on The Birds, which means a winning-streak-ending loss to a divisional opponent gets put under a bit of a magnifying glass. This is what’s been going around the past couple of days.

Contenders and their worst match-ups

ESPN’s Bill Barnwell did a whole big write-up about every Super Bowl contender’s biggest weaknesses and which team would be a bad match-up for them. There are a few notable things about the Eagles in his piece.

First, Barnwell says the Eagles' biggest weakness is “Offensive dependence on the big play.” That’s not a bad weakness to have, especially when you compare it to the Bills’ “Getting off the field on third down,” the Vikings’ “Taking sacks,” or the Lions’ “Relying on the blitz.”

Barnwell says, “In their victories this season, they have averaged five 20-plus-yard gains per contest. That's the most of any team…This offense needs to create those big plays because it's too inconsistent to march the ball down the field 10 yards at a time...” 

It feels like he might’ve written that before the Eagles' final drive against the Steelers in Week 15 where they had a 21-play drive that took the final 10:29 off the clock. In his defense, that’s an extreme and it’s only happened once.

But it feels like that’s kind of ignoring that a bunch of drives are ended by massive Saquon Barkley runs. It’s not the Eagles' fault that can’t stop him from running free for 50+ yards. Who’s to say that the offense wouldn’t be able to turn those drives into 10-play drives that melt the clock if Saquon got stopped?

He says, “The Eagles score nearly 37% of the time on drives in which their quarterbacks don't take any sacks, but they're 2-for-37 (5.4%) when there is at least one sack from the opposing defense.”

Well, that’s not great. Per Next Gen Stats, 11 of Jalen’s 38 sacks (29%) have come in the first quarter. This falls in line pretty well with how slow the offense starts games. 

Barnell also says that the Atlanta Falcons would be the team to avoid in the playoffs. He says that their defense “allowed gains of 20 yards or more on only 4.9% of opposing snaps, the fourth-best rate of any team.” 

If that’s the reason to avoid that team, then that’s totally fine. They’re starting a rookie quarterback and their season has gone off the rails since they beat the Eagles in Week 2. 

The last takeaway from Barnwell’s piece is that he says the Eagles are the team that the Lions want to avoid in the playoffs. Their biggest weakness is their reliance on blitzing and Jalen’s been awesome against the blitz this year. “Hurts' 94.5 QBR against the blitz is the best mark in football by nearly six points.”

Greg Olsen and the cause of concussions

Greg Olsen got the rawest of deals when Tom Brady took over as the color commentator on Fox’s A-team. He took a $7 million pay cut when Brady grabbed the reins, and then he also didn’t get the biggest games on the Sunday slate.

This whole thing stinks because Greg is normally really good at his job. He explains things in really good detail, has excellent insight into the modern NFL since he recently retired, and gets excited without moaning euphorically into the microphone like Tony Romo.  

He was on the call for the Eagles game this past Sunday, and he’s drawn the ire of Eagles fans. For what felt like the entire game, Greg and his partner Joe Davis talked about how wildly incredible it was that the Commanders mounted a comeback. At the same time, neither of them remotely acknowledged that the Eagles didn’t have their starting quarterback, or that he was taken out via a dirty hit from Frankie Luvu.

Greg felt some heat and made a statement on Twitter:

First off, Hurts was absolutely knocked out of the game. Correct, “his head hit the ground,” but why did that happen Greg? Was he head-butting the ground? Did he hurdle someone, get his legs taken out from under him and land funny? Or did he go to the ground and take a shot directly to the dome and have his head smashed into the ground by a linebacker? 

It was the last one, Greg. That was absolutely a dirty hit. Luvu lowered the crown of his helmet into Hurts' ear hole when he was going down. 

Now, did the head-to-head contact give Jalen the concussion? Probably not. So, you’re right Greg, it was the ground, but if a guy got pushed off the top of a building, you wouldn’t say, “The push didn’t kill him, hitting the ground did.’ Technically it’s correct, but also super wrong. 

This won’t be the end of it, because Greg and Joe are going to be on the call for the Week 17 game against the Cowboys, so… that’ll probably go great. Speaking of that game, it’s also in the news.

Eagles Week 17 game is flexed to the early slate.

Unfortunately, the Eagles' fate as the second seed in the NFC looks like it’s sealed and the top seed is going to be either the Minnesota Vikings or the Detroit Lions. The Eagles can get there, but it’s really really improbable.

In Week 17, they need the Vikings to lose to the Packers and the Lions to lose to the 49ers. The Vikings falling to the Packers seems reasonable. The Lions losing to the 49ers seems like a hell of a long shot, especially since San Fran is playing for nothing and they’ll be without three starting offensive linemen. 

Then in Week 18, the Vikings would need to beat the Lions in Detroit. Unfortunately at that point in this scenario, the Vikings would be eliminated from top-seed contention and they would probably be resting their starters while the Lions are playing their starters.

All this to say is that the Week 17 Packers-Vikings game is much more important to the entirety of the NFC playoff picture than the Eagles-Cowboys game, so the powers that be pulled the old switcheroo and flexed the Eagles-Cowboys game to 1 pm on Sunday, December 29th and the Vikings game to the 4:25 spot. 

It stinks because that means we won’t get to watch the early slate on Red Zone. Any day that you get to watch the early slate with Scott Hanson is a good day. 

This is the second to last full Sunday of football and the whole Week 18 schedule is still TBD. Hopefully, the schedule falls in our favor for the regular season finale so we don’t have to spend the most valuable three hours of the football afternoon watching the Giants actively try to lose to Kenny Pickett. That’s gross.