Heading into their Week 4 matchup against the Rams tomorrow, Philadelphia’s offense has had highs and lows. After their Week 3 loss to Chicago on Monday, the Eagles offense is coming off their lowest point of this season.
Philly’s first biggest issue is that their interior offensive line play has been poor, to put it lightly. Week one, it was easy to just throw it to the side and say, well, Landon Dickerson clearly wasn’t one hundred percent. Not to mention, it was week one under a new offensive coordinator.
Dickerson was placed on injured reserve after week one, and the Eagles made shifts to the interior of their offensive line. They moved Cam Jurgens to left guard and had Drew Kendall replace Jurgens at center.
Yet the interior offensive line still has been a problem; they’re getting little push in the run game and continuously creating muddy pockets for Jalen Hurts to navigate. In particular, Jurgens has stood out, and not in a good way.
In Week 3 against the Bears, he allowed four pass rush wins, which was the most given up by almost any of Philly’s offensive linemen. Before the Thursday night game, Jurgens out of 91 qualified interior offensive linemen, ranked 5th most in penalties, 12th most pressures allowed, and 87th in pass blocking grade per Pro Football Focus.
Philadelphia’s second biggest problem has been their lack of success on early downs. After their week two win against Tennessee, the Eagles, per Sumer Sports, had an early-down success rate of 31.5% (3rd percentile) and a late-down success rate of 60.6% (96th percentile).
These marks are not only a massive difference in the context of this season but also in the past four years. Those aforementioned differences in success rates were the largest to start a season since 2022.
Week three against the Bears game repeated this same lack of early down success, but this time Hurts ‘ third-down magic ran out. Sean Mannion’s second-half playcalling on early downs was very predictable.
Instead of using more misdirection in the run and screen game, Mannion continued to call the same predictable runs. Along with having Makai Lemon run some type of pre-snap motion into throwing a screen to him behind the line of scrimmage that ends up losing Philadelphia at least three yards.
Adding some misdirection in the run game and instead of throwing a screen pass to Lemon behind the line of scrimmage. Use the screen as bait to open up a slant route or a wheel route down the sideline.
As a result of their lack of early down success, this puts the Eagles regularly in third and long. In weeks one and two, they’ve been able to convert despite not being ideal down and distances on third down.
The volatility of living in that world came crashing down against Chicago. In eight third-down opportunities against the Bears, the average yards to go was 7.6 yards.
They went on to go 2/9 on third down, for a third-down conversion rate of 22%. This led to Philadelphia producing their worst offensive performance of the past four seasons based on EPA per drive per Sheil Kapadia. They had nine possessions this game, netting one touchdown, four punts, three turnovers, and one failed fourth-down attempt.
With injuries to Dallas Goedert, Landon Dickerson, and recently DeVonta Smith keeping them out of the lineup for the next few weeks. It’s up to Mannion to get creative and solve these problems with an offense not at full strength.
Maybe we’ll see Mannion switch to playing out of 11-personnel as their main formation. Their run game has seen significantly better success from 11 personnel compared to 12 personnel.
Per Sumer Sports, from 11 personnel the Eagles average 253 rushing yards on 46 carries for 5.5 yards per carry. While on runs from 12 personnel, they’ve eclipsed only 61 rushing yards on 27 carries for 2.3 yards per carry.
As the famous saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. If the Eagles want this offense to find its groove, they need Mannion to get creative and show he is the evil genius Jordan Malita claimed him to be during the offseason.
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