Miserable Night

I was actually excited for the Eagles preseason game against the Patriots. I wanted to see another good outing from Jalen Hurts and of course I was stoked to see DeVonta Smith make his debut. The team practiced well so I hoped for a good showing.

Oops.

NE 35
PHI 0

You know how sometimes the score doesn’t paint an accurate picture? That score was accurate. This was a long, miserable night for the Eagles. But there was actually a reason for some of the poor play.

Jalen Hurts got sick before the game and didn’t play. He had abdominal pain and the team sent him to the hospital to be checked out. He had some kind of a stomach bug. He should be fine, but will be at home for a couple of days.

Once the coaches knew Hurts was out, they sat Jason Kelce, Brandon Brooks and Lane Johnson. The top five DL all sat out. Darius Slay sat out. This was a mixture of some starters and a lot of backups going against the Pats starters. That went about how you would expect.

This is one of the worst preseason performances I’ve ever seen. Take that with a grain of salt because it is the preseason, but still…that’s not good.

Joe Flacco got the start and instead of playing a solid game like last week he decided to stink up the joint. It was hard to get a feel for the Eagles young WRs with Flacco manning the helm.

We did get to see Smith in action and he looked good overall. There were a couple of balls he failed to catch. You can argue whether they were drops or not, but I guarantee you DeVonta wasn’t happy with them. He did move well and ran really good routes.

DeVonta Smith creates separation so easily, man. pic.twitter.com/KPQWLuMMOb

— Austin Gayle (@PFF_AustinGayle) August 20, 2021

You can see where he is going to be really good this year. Smith knows how to get separation even on a short route. After the first couple of throws, he caught the ball well and looked comfortable. Flacco didn’t do him any favors with a couple of those passes.

Rookie RB Kenny Gainwell had a good showing. He continues to impress as a runner and receiver.

The OL struggled to pass protect and handle blitzes. Neither Flacco nor Nick Mullens had a great pocket to work from. Both QBs really struggled. I felt bad for the young receivers. They didn’t get many passes thrown their way, which makes it tough to impress the coaches.

Rookie DE Milton Williams had some good moments.

The Eagles LBs were really good in the first half. Alex Singleton flew around the field and made a ton of tackles. I thought Eric Wilson tackled well. T.J. Edwards broke up a couple of passes. Genard Avery played and looked pretty good. Maybe playing LB will bring out the best in him.

Rookie CB Zech McPhearson had a bad game. The lack of a good pass rush hurt him for sure, but he struggled no matter how you slice it. This can be a good learning experience for him.

The Eagles are in rebuilding mode. The roster isn’t loaded with great starters. The backups are a notch below them and the third stringers are not good right now (overall, of course). The more you see of the 2’s and 3’s, the more you can see there is a need to build the talent level of this team.

One other factor is that Nick Sirianni and his staff are going pretty vanilla. Most coaches do that in the preseason, but Sirianni has remarked multiple times about how one advantage the Eagles have is that other teams don’t know what they’ll do schematically. Eagles coaches want to save the good stuff for real games.

When you have lesser players and vanilla schemes…you get your ass whipped.

In the last six quarters the Eagles have been outscored 52-0. Not ideal.

This doesn’t mean a lot because the playbook will open up and most of these players will be gone, but it still isn’t a good look. Sirianni might have helped things out by announcing that a lot of starters would sit. That would temper our expectations. I’m sure the TV people and the team don’t want him to do that so you get a lot of people who tune in only to waste their night watching bad, bad football.

There was a serious injury to backup TE Jason Croom. Safety K’Von Wallace suffered a groin injury. We don’t know if this is serious or not, but he had missed time due to a groin this summer so it isn’t ideal.

*****

Some people are wondering what is up with Hurts. Are the Eagles hiding something? Is there more to this story than a stomach bug?

I’m not going to get too fired up.

If something is up, we’ll find out about it in the coming days. For now, I’ll take them at their word.

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