Get-Right Game 2.0: What the Eagles need to change and who needs to step up

The Week 6 game against the Giants was supposed to put the Philadelphia Eagles on the right track after their Week 5 loss to the Broncos. It ended up being an objectively extreme failure. They couldn’t run, couldn’t throw, got run over, got thrown over, and couldn’t field a kick. Everything somehow got much, much worse. 

It’d be great if there were just one problem. Hell, it’d be great if it were just one big problem. Instead, there’s a handful of small problems, a few big problems, and one massive problem. 

Don’t waste the gift of a mini-bye week

All the problems are relatively fixable… It’s just up to the team and the powers that be to do it. Luckily, the Eagles just had another mini-bye, so they had a little bit of time to do some self-scouting. 

If I were them, these are the things that I’d be looking to change, and the guys who I would be asking more of. Let’s start with special teams, then defense, and then offense. 

Special teams

The Eagles have done a phenomenal job with some of their special teams units… and just the absolute worst possible job with returning kicks. They’ve won games blocking field goals, and Jake Elliott has not missed a single kick, including three from more than 50 yards. 

They traded two draft picks to the Jaguars for Tank Bigsby so he could be their return specialist. Since then, he has returned nine kicks. He muffed two of them and returned one that was going to land in the end zone. He’s averaging 20.7 return yards, which ranks 84th in average return yards among anyone who has returned more than three kickoffs this season. 

John Metchie, one of the Eagles’ other returners, is even worse. He’s fielded seven kicks, muffed three of them, and is averaging 17.1 yards per return. 

It's terrible. The fix? Yeesh. I guess don’t let them do it anymore until they put in their 10,000 hours? It’s constantly setting the Eagles up with terrible field position. 

They have Xavier Gipson and Britain Covey on the practice squad… give one of those guys a shot, because it’d be crazy dumb to keep letting Bigsby and Metchie squander everything.

The other option is to take the Eagles’ scouting department at their word; maybe Bigsby is a really good kick returner. If that’s the case, pull a Space Jam and find the football that has all of his talent. Let him touch it, then he gets it all back, and we’re good to go.

Defense

The Eagles’ defense is in trouble, but not in the way that the offense is. The defense is about the personnel rather than the structure. 

They only have four healthy edge rushers, Jalen Carter’s been playing hurt/relatively bad, Quinyon Mitchell just missed most of a game with a hamstring thing, and the cornerback depth is atrocious. Those are some big problems. Luckily, Vic Fangio is the brain behind the operation, and if there’s anyone who can figure out this puzzle from hell, it’s him.

Starting with the edge rushers: The Eagles need to trade for help. I covered it on Tuesday: there are a handful of guys they could go after who are currently on teams whose seasons are over. In the meantime, Jalyx Hunt needs to be the guy to step up.

He’s been okay, which would normally be fine, but given the circumstances, he needs to be more than that. The initial hope is that he’d take the Nolan Smith approach and get better as the season goes on… But when Nolan Smith did that, he had Brandon Graham and Josh Sweat in the room. Hunt has Josh Uche, Azeez Ojulari, and Patrick Johnson. That means it’d be super helpful if he kind of just got really good, really quickly. 

Jalen Carter is another guy who needs to step up. The entire offseason was about how this was going to be the season he puts himself at the top of the Defensive Player of the Year debate. So far, he’s playing (when he plays) like just an above-average defensive tackle. That’s not good enough for how this defense is built. He needs to be a game wrecker, eat double teams, and free up the guys next to him. 

The problem is that he’s clearly going through some kind of injury, or series of injuries. If that’s what’s holding him back, then he needs to get healthy. Unfortunately, the time for that is over because now it’s time for him to save the season.

As for the cornerback depth? Yikes. We certainly can’t see Kelee Ringo on the field ever again; that’d help out a lot. I think the Eagles made their move at cornerback when they traded for Jakorian Bennett in the offseason, and I don’t imagine that they’ll trade for another one. That’s mostly because starting-caliber cornerbacks are at a premium in the NFL. If a team has one, they’re not going to let those guys go for cheap. 

We’re still waiting for Bennett to come back from IR, which will probably (read: hopefully) be after the Eagles’ Week 9 bye. 

In the meantime, Adoree’ Jackson needs to be serviceable and play about 100 times more physically than he did in Week 6. 

Cooper DeJean certainly can play outside corner, but this defense wants to play nickel and have him play the slot. It’d stink if he had to play outside full-time, but if that’s the way that Fangio gets the best 11 players on the field, then that’s the way it would have to be. 

Offense

The Eagles' offense is going to be a whole lot better if they can run the ball. I’m not even saying they need to be able to run it effectively; they just need to have some semblance of a running game, because right now it’s brutal. Unfortunately, that’s a tricky fix.

On one hand, you have a worn-out offensive line. They’re coming off a long and super-physical season they had in 2024, but they’re mostly healthy… aside from Landon Dickerson and Cam Jurgens.

That being said, Tyler Steen does need to step up. Every other starter played around 1,000 offensive snaps last season, whereas Steen played around 300. He doesn’t really have that same ‘my body just went through absolute hell for six months’ excuse.

Steen’s a good football player, but he simply doesn’t have the same power as Mekhi Becton did last season. That makes sense since Becton was a 370-ish pound freak of nature leviathan, and Steen is just 320-ish pounds. It’d be cool if he started to show a little more juice in the running game, but sometimes guys are who they are. It seems like Steen might be that kind of guy, which is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just a thing. 

As for changes in the run game… Woof. Lane Johnson had a scrum at his locker after the Week 6 loss. He nailed it with what he said: “A lot of what we did last year was run play action, and it kind of fed off each other, and the defense had a real hard time kind of guessing what it was going to be. I feel like the last two weeks, you kind of know what it is. You know when the pass is coming, you know when the run’s coming. But it all starts with us, you know, collectively as an offense. Moving forward, we got to do a better job of that…"

On offensive adjustments, Johnson said, “We have things that we talk about… and then the execution isn’t there. We get behind the chains, we get very predictable… I mean, it’s frustrating, but you know, we have a lot of season ahead of us, and we’re confident with the guys in this room, how we work to get it fixed, to make games not so hard on ourselves, and make it more fluid…”

On fixing the offense: “You got to see where you’re inefficient. Maybe there are keys that we’re giving away what we’re doing. But at the end of the day, we got to keep the defense guessing, not be predictable…”

Predictability for the offense is huge. Just watching the games, you can pretty much guess if a play is going to be a run or a pass, and be right 75% of the time.  I imagine defenses, with professional football players and defensive coordinators, aren’t just guessing what’s coming; they’re knowing it. 

And it’s not just like they know if it’s a run or a pass, but they know what the run scheme is going to be and where the ball is going. If we’re frustrated watching it, you have to think Lane Johnson is about 100 times more frustrated actually doing it. 

There are a few things the Eagles can do to get defenses on their heels. Obviously, getting back to play action would be huge. Right now, the Eagles use play action on 19.2% of their drop-backs, per PFF (27th in the NFL). Despite that, Hurts has the fifth-highest completion percentage with P/A, and he’s thrown two of his eight touchdowns with it, too. This is an insanely easy fix.

Is something wrong with Jalen Hurts?

Another thing they can do to slow down the defense is run more RPOs and get Jalen Hurts involved in the running game. Right now, Hurts is a very small part of the running game, and I would argue that defenses don’t necessarily have to account for him as a +1 with any consistency.

I have no idea why they haven’t done this. Hurts was asked if he had any influence on how little the Eagles use designed quarterback runs. Hurts answered, “No.” That means someone else (whose name probably rhymes with Devin Chapullo) is choosing not to press that button, and that person needs to get it together. 

With RPOs, the entire point is to have multiple options based on what the defense is showing you. That would help specifically with keeping the defense honest, and we know that Hurts and this offense can be pretty awesome when they get those rolling. 

Something else that wouldn’t necessarily be a fix, but more of a thing that I want to see (or not see): How’s about no more Kylen Gransen? If the Eagles are looking to do heavy packages, they should have Dallas Goedert and Fred Johnson on the field. It seems like every single week, Gransen whiffs on a block, and the play goes to hell. Let’s just keep him on the bench until there’s a real reason for the third tight end to be on the field. 

For the passing game to get fixed, it seems like the biggest change is just more creativity. If there’s a way to take A.J. Brown out of the game, it’s to put him in a spot where defensive backs can just sit on his routes. The way that cornerbacks can sit on his routes is if they watch the film and know what’s coming… Again, predictability.

They could also try to force good matchups. They’ve done this before, and it’s worked, but they don’t do it with any kind of consistency. Against the Broncos, the Eagles put Brown in the slot with Dallas Goedert outside. That put Patrick Surtain on Goedert and a linebacker on Brown. Brown ended up getting open deep… but then he stopped running a route and we all know how that ended. 

Another thing that could help the passing game is lining up in more empty formations. In the past, Jalen Hurts has said that he likes empty formations because they allow him to see the whole defense by spreading them out. Think about how defenses have been loading the line of scrimmage and then dropping guys into coverage: in theory, that’s a whole lot harder for them to do if you spread the offense from sideline to sideline.

These aren’t the only fixes that the offense can make, and it’s not exactly the most in-depth discussion of what those changes would look like. But if you’re watching the game and you see this stuff, hopefully it means the Eagles made good use of their mini-bye.