Kenny Pickett comes up just short: ‘I wanted that one bad'

Kenny Pickett gave the Eagles a chance to win, and that’s all you can really ask for.

He wasn’t great. He wasn’t elite. He certainly wasn’t Jalen Hurts.

But he went out and battled in his first game as an Eagle against the NFL’s 4th-ranked pass defense after not playing for more than a year and engineered six scoring drives.

It just wasn’t enough.

The Commanders came back from 14 points down to beat the Eagles 36-33 at the stadium formerly known as FedEx, delaying for now the Eagles clinching the NFC East.

“I’m focused on the outcome,” Pickett said. “I'm just sitting here frustrated. I wanted to get that one for our team. We've got to learn from it and move on.

“I’m honestly just sitting here just pissed off, man. Wanted to win that one bad, point blank."

Pickett entered the game in the middle of the first quarter with the Eagles already up 7-0 after Hurts suffered a concussion. He was rusty, which is to be expected considering he hadn’t played significant snaps since Week 13 last year with the Steelers.

He threw a touchdown pass to A.J. Brown, got picked off deep in Eagles territory, converted a couple big fourth downs and on one of the game’s pivotal plays - a 3rd-and-5 on Washington’s 22-yard-line with 2:07 left and the Eagles up 30-28 - he threw a perfect pass past the sticks that DeVonta Smith dropped.

If he catches it? Ballgame.

“I’d have to go back and watch it, but there's definitely plays that I want back, and I know that we want back as a team.,” Pickett said. “You have to give credit to them. They played really hard as well. It came down to the wire, but there's things that change games long before you get to the end of the game. We’ve got to go back and look at those and see what we all can improve on and move on.”

Pickett suffered a rib injury along the way that had Tanner McKee warming up.

The Eagles still need a win or Commanders loss to clinch the NFC East title and No. 2 seed, and the Cowboys come to the Linc Sunday.

Can Hurts clear concussion protocol in a week? Will Pickett be healthy enough to start? Will McKee make his first NFL appearance?

It all remains to be seen.

Pickett completed 14 of 24 passes for 143 yards with the one TD and one INT. He took a couple bad sacks, had a fumble that Lane Johnson recovered and completed just one pass over 15 yards.

The numbers would have looked a little better if Smith and Saquon Barkley made critical 3rd-down receptions in the fourth quarter.

"I think he did a good job,” Barkley said. “We just didn’t win the football game, you know? One play goes here or one play goes there, it'd be a different conversation.”

All in all, about what you’d expect from a guy who hasn’t played in a year and didn’t get any reps all week.

“Yeah, it's tough, it's tough,” Pickett said. “You don't get any physical snaps. I just try to do the best I can, mentally locked into the game plan, understanding the checks and how, really how these guys run routes, because I don't get a chance to throw to them.

“So I try to pay attention as much as I can and then just go out there and let it loose and throw the ball. I just try to channel as much as I could from the preparation standpoint when I got out there. At the end of the day, you just got to go play.”

Pickett is smart enough to know that A.J. Brown is his bread and butter when he’s out there.

Pickett threw 24 passes and 15 of them were targets to Brown, who caught eight for 97 yards and also drew three pass interferences from Marshon Lattimore for 68 more yards. Seven of his nine other targets went to Smith, with one each to Barkley and Kenny Gainwell.

“We were talking after every series,” Pickett said. “We were coming up with some things on the fly, some things that they've done with Jalen before that I wasn't aware of. Trying to play catch up in certain parts of the game and just making sure we communicate really well.

“Those guys are awesome at it. They've been doing this for a long time so it was really cool to get out there, have an opportunity to play with them.”

The Eagles didn’t lose this game because of Pickett, they lost because the defense fell apart in the fourth quarter, allowing 22 points in the game’s final 13 1/2 minutes.

If Pickett does have to play Sunday and is healthy, you would think a week’s worth of reps with Brown and Smith would help a lot.

"He played good. He played good,” Smith said. “I think he settled in well. I think he made the right reads and things like that. Unfortunately, I didn't make the last play.”

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