Taking Chances

Posted: October 31st, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Philadelphia Eagles | Comments Off on Taking Chances

Carson Wentz is an aggressive QB. Doug Pederson is an aggressive coach. Howie Roseman is a very aggressive GM.

This is good and should be embraced.

We’ve seen plenty of QBs who do a great job of protecting the ball. The problem is they can be scared to throw into coverage. You can’t sit around and wait for receivers to be wide open in the NFL. That isn’t how things work. You must be willing to take chances.

Marty Schottenheimer is one of the great coaches in league history. He won 200 career games and had a winning percentage of .613. The first year he made the playoffs, the Bears were doing the Super Bowl Shuffle. The last year Schottenheimer made the playoffs, Jason Peters was the starting LT for Buffalo. That’s a long time to be winning NFL games. The problem is that Schottenheimer was an old school coach, thinking that more games are lost than won. He was a conservative coach and that showed up in the postseason, when he faced good teams. Schottenheimer won 5 playoff games in his career. Pederson won 3 last year alone.

Ted Thompson is one of the great GMs in league history. He drafted a slew of great players, including Aaron Rodgers. Thompson preferred to focus on the draft and didn’t do much in the way of making trades or signing big free agents. He helped the Packers win a Super Bowl, but it is fair to question whether they would have done even better if Thompson had been more aggressive.

Being good isn’t good enough in the NFL.

You must take chances to get over the top. This is true on and off the field.

Most of the chances taken by Wentz, Pederson and Roseman have paid off in the last couple of years. Things won’t stay that way. There will be some failures. It could be that the Golden Tate trade is going to be a waste of resources for the Eagles. We’ll have to wait and see on that. We saw Wentz force some throws late in the Carolina game and that played a part in the Eagles loss. One of these days, Pederson will go for it on fourth down and it will blow up in his face.

That’s okay.

The Eagles aggression helped them to win a Super Bowl last year.

It is better to have people in your organization that are willing to take chances rather than those who are afraid to fail. There are going to be misses. You must live with them if you want to reap the benefits of the risks that do pay off.

We can’t know everything that Roseman was thinking about when he agreed to the Tate deal. What we do know is that he felt this was a chance worth taking. To him, the reward was worth the risk.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

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Tate met the media today. Nothing too groundbreaking.

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Make all the jokes you want, but the Eagles need Mills to get healthy.

I am curious to see what happens with Dexter McDougle. He really struggled in London, slipping several times. Will Jim Schwartz stick with him or will he come up with a different lineup?

Injuries will play a part in his decision. If Sidney Jones is healthy, that changes everything. Having Mills healthy would help as well.

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Here is Tim Hauck breaking down the play of FS Avonte Maddox.

It is hard not to get excited by Maddox. The Eagles may have found their FS of the future.

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