Through five games this season, the Philadelphia Eagles’ offense has looked unstoppable for only two halves. That means that 20 percent of the time, they look amazing, and 80 percent of the time, they look unbelievably human. That's a big yikes.
It’s been a problem, but when they started the season with a 4-0 record, all you can do is shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Well… they keep winning, so let’s see where this goes.’ Now that they lost to the Denver Broncos in Week 5, it’s a real problem. That begs the question: what went wrong this time?
Jalen Hurts gets better, and defenses evolve
The most important thing about the Eagles’ offense, hell, about the entire team: they have the most talented roster in the entire NFL. Raw talent is not the issue.
However, this offense is not the same as the 2024 offense, and it’s purely because the offensive line isn’t the juggernaut in the running game that everyone is used to. Last year, until the Super Bowl, if the Eagles wanted to run the ball, they could. If teams sold out against the run? Cool, that means they just stacked the box, which means there are fewer guys on the back end to stop Saquon Barkley.
This year, King-Quan hasn’t gotten anything going, and it’s largely due to the offensive line being dinged up/hurt and playing sloppily. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still a really good offensive line, but in the running game, it’s been pretty not great. That stinks, big-time.
For the offense to flow the way that they (probably) want it to flow, they make teams bite on the run and sprinkle in explosive passes. That’s basic football strategy… but that’s not how it’s been working, and the Eagles' correction to that in Week 5 was to have Jalen Hurts throw the ball 38 times.
That can work, and it should work. There’s another strategy that the Ron Jaworski jersey-wearing 50-year-old guy sitting in section 226 yelling, ‘Run the ball!’ won’t like: throw the ball to open the run.
Unfortunately, the Eagles’ passing game hasn’t been working, and it hasn’t been working for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons, oddly enough, has not been the offensive line. They’ve been gross when they're trying to get a push, but they’ve been pretty studly when they’re taking a step back in pass protection.
So far through the season (and going back for the past two or three years), the Eagles don’t run creative route combinations or make things easy for their wide receivers with any kind of consistency. When it comes to passing games in the NFL, the best way to consistently win is to expose matchups.
Shoot, look at the infamous A.J. Brown route from the Broncos game: The Eagles put him in the slot to take him away from Pat Surtain’s shadow. Yada yada yada, Brown is wide open, and the pass goes incomplete. The key is that it was there.
It’s no secret that Jalen Hurts and the Eagles offense have issues against zone coverage. Per SumerSports, Hurts has a success rate of 51.1% against man coverage (ranked 9th among qualified passers) and a success rate of just 36.9% against zone (ranked 36th). That, for lack of a better phrase, sucks big-time.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Hurts has been making huge strides against the blitz. This season, he’s had a completion rate of 62% on dropbacks where he’s blitzed. That’s up from 51% in 2024, 55% in 2023, 49% in 2022, and 50% in 2021.
In Week 5, the Broncos exposed the Eagles’ issues against zone and their success against the blitz: They pulled a faux-Stalingrad. They threw a whole bunch of bodies at the line of scrimmage, and then dropped a whole gang of dudes into coverage. That made the Eagles have a whole bunch of guys in protection, and subsequently, not a whole lot of guys going out on routes.
To put it confusingly: Six or seven guys are blocking three or four rushers. That means there are three or four guys running routes through a defense with seven or eight zones.
To put it dumbly: the Eagles are getting tricked into being outnumbered… a la Stalingrad.
PHLY’s Fran Duffy put it nicely (and with no WWII references), “Instead of consistently sending extra bodies at Hurts to heat him up and rush him, they’re forcing him to read things out… When you have eight defenders in coverage, obviously that means passing lanes are tighter. That’s hard enough when you have five eligible receivers in the route. The problem the Eagles are facing? They don’t have five out in the route all that often on these looks.”
The alarming thing about what defenses are doing is that it’s not overwhelmingly hard to replicate. Sure, not all teams are going to have the Broncos’ Patrick Surtain, Nick Bonnitto, and Zach Allen or the Buccaneers' Vita Vea, Antoine Winfield Jr., and Yaya Diaby. Having horses like those guys makes implementing defensive schemes a whole lot easier...
But good defensive coordinators set their guys up in positions to win, and that’s what Vance Joseph and Todd Bowles have done the past two weeks.
Jalen Hurts was asked about the trend of teams giving him these pressure looks. He said, “I’d say that it has evolved over the years, and with that evolution, I’ve evolved, and I think we’ve all evolved naturally… the knowledge for the game has grown, and so being able to see certain things helps. And then when we get tested with something, we learn from it and we improve on it… I’ll continue to challenge myself, and we’ll continue to challenge ourselves… handling all different types of pressures… Now you see some zero, and you respond to that. Now you see some simulated pressures, and now we’ll respond to that, given the effort and the work that we put in.” (8:06 in the video below)
To me, this sounds like the Eagles know it’s something that they’re going to keep seeing, and they’re preparing for it. The problem is that this offense hasn’t shown that it can adjust mid-game, or at all.
If they’re going to fix these problems, it’s all going to have to start with offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo making those adjustments. As for what adjustments he can make? There are a lot of options.
Keep in mind: these are all basic solutions and not some super Xs and Os type of thing.
Figure out the sloppiness on the offensive line to make the running game a real threat. Saquon Barkley rocks, but he hasn’t really rocked this season. The best way to get him back into his game-wrecking mode is by letting him follow blocks rather than having him make something out of nothing (like what he did with the Giants). If this run game gets going, even a little bit, it’s going to create an upward spiral for the offense’s success.
Get Saquon Barkley in space. Cam Jurgens is not completely healthy, Landon Dickerson is out with an ankle thing (that’s probably not unrelated to the knee thing from the preseason), and Tyler Steen is good but not great. Lane Johnson and Jordan Mailata are the two best offensive linemen on this team, so how’s about some more outside zones rather than pounding inside zones? Run schemes are confusing and convoluted, so this is a super duper over-simplification, but you get what I mean.
Playaction is perfect for this situation. One of the best ways to beat zone coverages is by making the guys on defense slow. The Eagles' run game isn’t great, but teams still have to respect Saquon Barkley. If a handoff to him is an immediate threat, those guys will be slower to their zones, which opens up passing lanes.
Jalen Hurts needs to play in structure(?). The structure of the passing game isn’t consistently great, or even good… But it exists, and that can be enough. Another good way to beat zone is for the quarterback to throw the ball as he hits the top of his drop. Maybe those aren’t going to be explosive plays that blow your pants off, but at least they will be completions with an opportunity for your playmakers to get YAC. Also, maybe that will make the defense adjust a little bit and open up those plays that’ll make you have to wash your pants.
RPOs rock. This is a great way to let this offense be what it can be. In a perfect world, a Run-Pass Option or a Read Option allows the quarterback to read a defender, and when he makes the right read, that takes a defender out of the play. Now, instead of 11 guys on defense, there are only 10. With Jalen Hurts’ ability to run, that means a potential run game is now 11 on 10 in favor of the offense. If he throws the ball based on his read, it’ll be a quick throw, and again, force the defense to adjust.
Again, that’s all base-level stuff, and I’m not going to sit here and act like I’m breaking ground with offensive structures… However, Kevin Patullo and the powers that be for playcalling are getting stuck in a rut. They’re wasting downs (specifically early downs) and making everything sooooo much harder than it can be.
The Broncos' defense exposed holes in the Eagles’ offense. It’d be cool if it were just one thing that Birds could fix, but it’s not. Luckily, a lot of the problems are relatively small. Unfortunately, when you put them all together, it’s a mondo-sized problem.
Fortunately, they play the Giants in Week 6, and they are abysmal against the run. If there’s a game for the Eagles to remember what it feels like to bully a team into submission and then drop an A.J. Brown sized bomb for 6 points… It’d be this game.