Bleeding Green Nation
All-22 analysis from Philadelphia’s Week 10 win.
Well, this Philadelphia Eagles vs. Dallas Cowboys game was a bit of a weird one to analyze. I wasn’t too impressed with the offensive game plan, and I’ll explain why below, but there is no doubt the offense improved as the game went on.
The Cowboys did a few things schematically that the Eagles last had to deal with a while ago. Cowboys’ defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer showed a lot of “Double Mug” looks with his linebackers standing in both A-gaps. Zimmer is known for this, and I expected the Eagles to be a little bit more prepared for it. The Eagles struggled with who to protect in pass protection, and it led to the running back dealing with a linebacker far too often, even when the Cowboys only sent 4. Surprisingly, the interior offensive line had their worst game in a while in pass protection, and Cam Jurgens, in particular, struggled. As well as this, I thought the Eagles’ offense was too focused on taking shots down the field and didn’t give Jalen Hurts a lot of easy answers. If you add all of these things up, including some poor individual pass protection reps such as the one below from Kenneth Gainwell, then you get some poor reps. The offense took 5 sacks in the first half, which is not good enough. Some were on Hurts, some were on the scheme, some were on the protection and some were possibly because of the sun! (I’m not joking).
If you are wondering about the other sacks, here they are. We will look at a couple more later.
The Eagles' best drive of the first half resulted in an interception. It’s an interesting play to break down from a scheme perspective. If I had to distribute blame, this is more of a fantastic defensive play than a terrible mistake by Hurts. I think Hurts’ process is fine here, and this route from Dallas Goedert should be open against this coverage. I’m not even sure that Trevon Diggs is supposed to be covering Goedert here. If Hurts is going to make this throw, he needs to release the ball just half a second earlier and throw it even harder. In the red zone, the windows are very small. I expect Hurts to learn from this mistake and be a bit more cautious when trying this throw again.
This is such a fascinating play to look at. If you are looking at the result, then this is a fantastic play. It’s a brilliant throw by Hurts and a fantastic catch by Jahan Dotson. It’s really good to see that Hurts is starting to trust Dotson more, too. This is a real trust throw. However, this play also highlights some of the Eagles' issues in the first half. They were a bit too focused on the downfield shots. There was another throw where Hurts underthrew DeVonta Smith, which would have been a touchdown, but Hurts...
