I’m not sure I understand the comparison. But if I understand you to mean the 2010 Eagles had a good regular season and poor postseason to go into the next year (2011) without playing well together, I can understand your point. I think it’s a shallow comparison at best. For one thing, the Eagles gave the Packers the toughest game they faced all postseason last year. Philly lost a five point game where one of the best kickers in history missed two field goals. And yet they still had a chance to win at the end and a rookie WR made a poor play on a ball in the end zone which led to a pick. They didn’t have a poor postseason. A disappointing one, but they lost to the eventual champions.
There are a lot of things wrong with the Eagles right now. If they keep playing the way they are, I just can’t see how they win more than 3 or 4 games this season. Even so, they’re really close to being a good team again, and potentially a really good one.
It comes down to turnovers and tackling. Those are the biggest among many problems. The Eagles benched their worst tackler, and subsequently their defense toughened up against the 49ers in the 4th quarter (there’s talk that Juan Castillo’s defensive playcalling responsibilities were revoked at the same time). And many of their turnovers have been outright flukes. The Eagles have been careless with the football, but mostly they’ve been unlucky with regards to turnovers.
I could write 15,000 words about this team. But to spare everyone from having to scroll past those posts, I’ll just say that, assuming Page is benched permanently and Castillo is muzzled, I think the Eagles have hit bottom and they’ll start rebounding from here.
Actually two more things. I want to know what embarrassing mistakes Jaiquawn Jarrett is making that he can’t even sniff the field on defense. Jarrad Page was an abomination at safety last week, and Kurt Coleman, while better, was benched earlier this year for being awful himself. Jarrett is supposed to be a stout run defender and a sure tackler. He was drafted in the second round. Get him in the fucking game and if he royally screws it up you’ll have exactly what Page got you. There’s no possible way he’s as bad as Page. And his supposed strengths are exactly the biggest weaknesses on the defense.
And secondly, there’s a lot of heat on Andy Reid right now, and rightfully so. I don’t think he’s going to get fired, but let’s assume he does. Who else is out there that’s any good? Cowher? Gruden? Are they actually good coaches or do they have inflated reputations? Pretty much everyone with a high profile demands full control over personnel decisions, would either make for a good coach/GM hybrid? Is there anyone out there who might?
Gruden is a brilliant on-field coach and an astonishingly bad personnel guy. Granted, the Buccaneers gave up a lot of draft choices to get Gruden himself from the Raiders, but the team was loaded with talent when he got there and got less talented every year he was there.
Kind of perversely (for a supposed “quarterback guru”), Gruden’s big problem was finding quarterbacks. He didn’t use any first round picks on them, preferring to sign mostly over-the-hill free agents, and when he did decide to groom a young one, it was… Chris Simms.
Not a lot to feel good about in Philly. But if you look close enough (i.e. as a homer), things show signs of turning around. How? Well…
It’s obviously a combination of a porous defense and carelessness with the football that has kept this Eagles team from doing anything so far. I think they’ve gotten really unlucky with turnovers, and I don’t think that can realistically continue. At some point the batted balls and tipped passes hit the ground instead of a defender’s hands. At some point the Eagles will get a key interception or fumble recovery for once.
And the porous defense? Every week the team makes a small adjustment that helps a little. It hasn’t fixed anything yet, but it might all finally come together enough that all the big leaks are plugged and the ship is seaworthy again.
•They swapped out Matthews for Rolle, he came in and immediately made plays Matthews wasn’t making.
•They stopped trying to get cute with Nnamdi and instead let him play man press 80% of the game (he wasn’t targeted once and had his best game of the season against SF).
•They benched Coleman for Nate Allen (who finally looked like a second round pick again and had a good game against SF), and then benched Page for Coleman (and immediately the Eagles D stiffened and limited an efficient Buffalo offense to table scraps in the 4th).
•Danny Watkins got his first start, and while he was up and down, he largely held Marcell Dareus, the third overall pick, to a shutout. The first time any team has kept him off the stats sheet so far this year.
None of those changes makes a big difference alone, but together they may fix the problems enough to get the defense right again. Give Vick just a little more time in the pocket.
People are scrambling for cover like the sky is falling in Philly because the team has lost four straight. Part of the panic is due to inflated expectations to begin with. And at times the team looks like a dumpster fire, sure. But really, the margin between victory and defeat in a lot of these games is the width of a razor’s edge. One fewer tipped INT, one fewer stupid penalty, one fewer broken tackle in the secondary… suddenly they’re 2-3, or 3-2, maybe even 4-1. For how awful they’ve been, to beat every team in yardage, to be in every single game to the end, it doesn’t take a complete overhaul to straighten things out.
And the most fortunate thing is that nobody in the NFC has made a move for that second wildcard spot. It won’t matter if the Eagles lose this Sunday, they’ll be done. But if they win, they get a bye to take care of business and come back with three straight home games to push above .500.
One of the biggest things NFL analysts fail to account for is the effect of scheduling. 3 of Philadelphia’s losses were to winning teams, and 3 were one-score differentials.
That’s not super, but they aren’t getting blown out by terrible teams; their season point differential is only -7.
The bad news is there aren’t a lot of weak sisters coming up, either. I can definitely see them rebounding to 9-7 and squeaking in; but I can also see the whole thing imploding to 5-11. This week is definitely huge.
Yeah, none of the games have been blowouts. The Eagles’ losses were to teams with a combined record of 13-7, for an average of less than a touchdown a game. And on the subject of scheduling, this week will be the Eagles fourth road game in six.
That depends. Washington leads the division but they aren’t winning anything convincingly, except maybe the Giants but that game was a really long time ago. Washington beat the Rams by only 7, the Rams’ closest game of the year. And the Redskins beat lowly Arizona is a desperate come from behind win by 1. Meh.
Chicago, Arizona, Miami, Seattle, and Washington again all remaining, all flawed teams. The Eagles schedule is very favorable coming up.
But I do agree, if the Eagles lose this week they’re essentially done. They’d have to sweep the rest of the season probably. Not going to happen. As it is they probably have to go 9-2 the rest of the way to earn a playoff spot. I don’t think 9-7 will do it. And with 5 division games coming up, it’s going to be tough to win four of those.
I do think the pass defense can be turned around. Too much talent on the edges. However, the linebackers aren’t going to learn to tackle overnight; it’s a good thing nobody runs the ball in the NFL this year.
Were I an Iggles fan, my real worry would be that Michael Vick heard the clock strike midnight and turned back into a pumpkin. He’s on pace to match his best season passing with Atlanta in 10 games; unfortunately, he’s also on pace to shatter his own season highs for interceptions and fumbles.
You’re right in that he’s going to have to take better care of the ball. But he has seven picks - 2 tipped INTs against the Giants (off Steve Smith’s hands and one that bounced off DJax’s chest), 2 more against Buffalo (busted screen and one that bounced off Avant’s foot) and a third that fell out of his hand as he was hit, and one against Atlanta that wasn’t an INT at all, but the broadcast team failed to provide a single replay for Andy Reid to decide to challenge the call. That’s six of his seven picks that are flukey flukey flukey. Now, sometimes those things happen, sure, but you can’t expect that to continue. Vick can’t be that unlucky the entire season. I’d say on average he’d have 3 or 4 picks by now, not seven.
Instead, I think he’s just as good as he was last year. Very similar comp%, Yds/Att, and Yds/Gm. He’s also ahead of his Pass TD pace a year ago. The fumbles are very, very troubling. He got very lucky with those last year and seems to have swung completely around to the opposite side. If he’s going to run, he needs to tuck it away better. That goes for McCoy, DJax, and Maclin too. They all carry the ball like it’s a toy.
But the INTs? Only one was his fault, and that was the play in Buffalo where he threw the ball over the middle as he was getting creamed and didn’t see a LB in the way. He’s just getting unlucky.
Everyone is flawed, but not everyone is a flawed bad team. None of the teams I listed are good teams, except maybe Washington… no, not even Washington.
You can’t put Seattle on a list of truly bad teams and exclude Arizona from the same list. Especially since Seattle beat Arizona (and the Giants), and Arizona has only beaten Carolina. Arizona is at least as bad as Seattle.
I think that’s a little bit of a tough sell because there were two Vicks last year. As of the game when he blew up the Redskins, he had a 110+ rating, an 11/0 TD/Int, and two fumbles in about five and 1/8th games. And about 340 rushing yards and 4 TDs to boot. This year’s Vick is certainly not as good as that one. He was already getting sacked like a mother, though, and that luck you’re talking about had pretty much run out by that point.
Since that game, which is admittedly an arbitrary line to draw but which still leaves us with 11 consecutive games not including the playoff game, he’s an 88 rating, 18/13 TD/Int, and freaking 16 fumbles. Ints, sacks and fumbles for each of those games:
I just can’t see that. The fumbles are a problem this season, but you’ll notice they went from 3 and 3 in weeks 2 and 3 - to 0 and 0 in weeks 4 and 5. And the INTs, what more can I say? 85% of his interceptions are bad luck. Unsustainable pace. His INT% is higher than at any point in his career, and almost double what he’s had since joining Philly. If that gets cut down to what it has always been, or what it should be, he’d only have four picks or so. He’d finish around 4200+ yards, ~26 TDs, and ~15 INTs at that pace. Fantastic numbers even before adding what he’d contribute as a runner.
And your grouping of those last 11 games ignores the critical point that there was an offseason (of sorts) right in the middle. Vick made some pretty important strides during that offseason. He’s better against the blitz than ever before. He’s throwing the ball away instead of taking sacks more than ever before. He’s significantly better than he ever was in Atlanta. He’s a legitimate QB now. Last year wasn’t a fluke.
It’s a critical point that there was an offseason if the offseason made a difference. But the reason I pointed out the numbers is that you’re saying he’s been suddenly victimized by outrageous fortune this year. The numbers say he and the offense have basically picked up right where they left off in terms of protecting him and the ball. 4 picks in a game is unsustainable. But 13 in 11 games is certainly not, and that’s what he’s been sustaining for about 11 months. So if we have to guess what the next 11 are going to be like, all I’m saying is that expecting a normalization to that number makes more sense than a normalization to the ridiculous 2010 number that includes that 5 game stretch. That is not something to count on. As far as expecting his career numbers, he’s a totally different quarterback, right?
Same with the fumbles; it’s fair enough to say last year’s bagsful of fumbles don’t matter because there was an offseason in between, but you can’t brush off the fact that seven in the first three games was a continuation of the trend. If he got better at it, why didn’t he actually do better at it? I know you’re saying his numbers “should” be different, and it’s always a possibility that he improved and also hit a run of bad luck that made it look like no improvement at all, but that doesn’t seem like the smart bet.
It was embarrassing. It’s not much consolation to know that the Redskins played worse, because everyone expected the Redskins to suck. You think of Redskins and you automatically think “terrible team.” But I did not expect the Cowboys to be non-competitive in a division rivalry game. If they had no intention of putting forth an effort, they should have just stayed home. They have the players and the talent to play–they just didn’t.
**I may have to reassess this and my outlook for the Cowboys this year.
Another dispiriting thing about being a Redskins fan these days (i.e. since Gibbs retired again) is the little twinge of hope they give you at the beginning of each season before showing their true colors.
2008: started 6-2, finished 8-8
2009: started 2-2, finished 4-12
2010: started 4-3, finished 6-10
2011: started 3-1, already down to 3-4.
Can’t really pin it on Snyder (not that he could be replaced). He’s done, as far as I can tell, a much better job about letting the coaches and GM do their thing the past two years and they’ve done what they can in fixing the mess Snyder and Cerrato got the team into. Believe it or not, they’re a far improved team compared to what they were just a few years ago.
I had them at about 8-8 this year, but I suppose my expectations were misguided in thinking they’d escape the season without injuries testing their non-existent depth. All teams suffer injuries and the good ones absorb it and overcome, but this team is too thin at too many positions to handle the losses they’ve suffered, and they’ve suffered some key ones.
As to the observation, it’s a bit disingenuous to discount the season opener as that team they beat currently has 5 wins. I hate “observations” like these because they’re clearly designed to skew perceptions. Sure, they’re not a good team, but that statement fails to observe that the other teams they’ve beaten since the season opener number exactly two, and that the four teams they’ve lost to presently stand at a combined 13 wins; one of them being an Eagles team who are better than their record.