It’s hard to know what to make of this team. Anyone who seems certain he/she knows what the Eagles are and what they can be is either greatly confused or lying or both.
They have won three games and lost three games. They have looked excellent in some moments and awful in others, often in the same outing. Sam Bradford has thrown a lot of passes, some of them terrific, many of them terrible. DeMarco Murray was invisible in his first three games and then suddenly materialized in his last two. Jordan Matthews has made some fantastic plays — and plenty of ones you’d like to forget. The defense played the hero against the Giants and the goats against Washington. And through it all, the Eagles are tied for the lead in a division that’s been as periodically ugly as them.
The Eagles are a Rorschach test. They’re a Jackson Pollock painting. They’re the NFL equivalent of the new Atlanta Hawks uniforms. You could have reasonable people stand there and stare at them for a long while and still come away with wholly different ideas about what they just looked at and what it all means. Just consider the conflicting facts so far.
In the first four weeks, the Eagles averaged 19.5 points and 294 yards of total offense. In the last two weeks, they’ve averaged 33 points and 472 yards of total offense.
The Eagles scored their first first-quarter touchdown of the season when they punched one into the end zone against the Giants. But their opening drives this year have been so unsightly you don’t want to stare at them for too long, lest your face freeze in horror: 4 yards and punt, 9 yards and punt, 59 yards and field goal, minus-8 yards and punt, 18 yards and turnover on downs, 3 yards and punt.
In his first three games, Murray rushed for 47 yards and added 76 receiving yards. In his last two games, Murray has 192 rushing yards and 51 receiving yards.
Matthews leads the team in receptions, receiving yards and first downs. He also leads the team in drops.
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And then there’s Bradford. He has thrown for 1,561 yards. That’s 12th in the NFL. He has nine touchdowns. That’s tied for ninth. He’s also unleashed nine interceptions. That’s the second-most in the league. Four of those picks have come in the end zone. No other NFL quarterback has more than two end-zone interceptions.
Chip Kelly said some of Bradford’s miscues are owed to communication issues with his receivers. That’s fair, but so is this: Bradford has made some bad decisions and some bad throws. For every time the receiver made a mistake, there’s another instance of Bradford looking sub-optimal.
“The one to (Zach) Ertz was probably a little bit underthrown,” Kelly said about the end-zone interception against the Giants. “I think Sam would tell you the same thing. It was kind of the same issue with the one Riley (Cooper) broke in the Saints game where we thought we had it clean but then (Brandon) Browner came back underneath it. We’ve got to put a little bit more air under it and give the receiver a chance to catch it and not the [defensive back].”
If there has been any one consistent thing about the Eagles this year, it’s the defense. Bill Davis’ crew — the same unit that, in observance of the facts, let Kirk Cousins march the length of the field on it to wrestle a win away from the Eagles — is eighth in rushing yards allowed per game, 19th in passing yards allowed per game (which actually represents an improvement year over year) and, most importantly, sixth in points allowed per game. Despite the injuries to Kiko Alonso and Mychal Kendricks, despite Byron Maxwell clutching opposing receivers each week like he’s saying goodbye to a loved one at the airport, the defense has been solid. So there’s that. That much is hard to argue. The rest of it is left open to interpretation.
That’s the thing. You can believe whatever you want about these Eagles. Week to week, we tend to see them through the filter of the last game played. If they’re coming off a loss, all is lost. If they’re coming off a win, maybe those plans to visit the Bay Area in February aren’t really so wild. But there’s another possibility, one we too often fail to acknowledge in Philadelphia because this is generally a city of extremes when it comes to sports. The middle. The gray area. It’s entirely possible that’s what this team is and where it will reside — somewhere north of bad but well south of good, somewhere close to mattering but not close enough. What then? What if what we’ve seen so far isn’t so hard to interpret after all? What if this is who they are? What if, in our unending attempt to define them and place them well ahead or well behind the NFL peloton, we failed to realize that they’re simply part of the pack and nothing more?
