Bleeding Green Nation
Defensive analysis from Philadelphia’s Divisional Round win over Los Angeles.
This was an interesting one to analyze. The Philadelphia Eagles defense played well, but they also gave up 402 yards to the Los Angeles Rams at 5.7 yards per play. There is a lot to talk about this week.
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How many 34-year-old cornerbacks in NFL history have played as well as Darius Slay? Slay didn’t have a perfect game, and Matthew Stafford targeted him a lot, but he did a very good job lined up against Puka Nucua. I was a little stunned by how much single-high coverage the Eagles played this week, but we saw a lot of cover 3. The Rams use a lot of condensed splits, and they love these deep in routes because the cornerbacks always have outside leverage. Slay does exceptionally well here and it’s a shame he couldn’t pick it off.
There are not many offensive minds that are better than Sean McVay. I imagine that Fangio was a little surprised by the Rams’ approach in the run game this week and it led to the Rams having quite a bit of success. Kyren Williams had 19 carries for 106 yards. I was a little surprised we didn’t see more Jordan Davis, as the Eagles played more 5-man fronts in the first matchup than they did in this one. The Rams do not usually run trap plays, but they did in this game. The first run of the game was Crunch, which is a great play to run at a team with aggressive defensive tackles. Credit has to go to McVay, but the Eagles didn’t help themselves with some missed tackles. C.J. Gardner-Johnson could have helped to prevent a big gain here.
The biggest takeaway I had from this game was that Fangio was mixing up his fronts a lot. He played a variety of different fronts to get the defensive lineman, and Jalen Carter, in particular, in one-on-one matchups. The Eagles used a lot of stunts, too, and the majority of their success rushing the quarterback came from stunts. This was an excellent stunt by Jalen Carter and Nolan Smith.
This was a weird game. As I stated in the tweet, the Eagles gave up 324 passing yards, which is not good. However, 115 yards came on three plays. These three plays were not coverage busts. They were just straight-up contested situations that the Eagles lost. Two of them were against Isaiah Rodgers, including the one below. I was disappointed for Rodgers because he was good in coverage all game but struggled at the catch point. Sadly, quarterbacks like Matthew Stafford will test your...
