January 16, 2024
The season's over and the Eagles are in pieces.
The Buccaneers trounced them, 32-9, in the NFC Wild Card Monday night to complete a meteoric spiral of six losses in seven games with each somehow more agonizing and embarrassing than the last.
Nick Sirianni's seat is getting hot, Jalen Hurts didn't give an outright endorsement of him when asked postgame, and Jason Kelce is reportedly getting set to finally call it a career.
The Eagles are at a massive crossroads, but right now there is only the mess that got them here.
Here's what they're saying about it...
Maybe the truly worst part about Monday night was that we got exactly what we were all fearing: A broken mess of an Eagles team with zero fight.
And yet they still had a chance to snap out of it and win. The Bucs were floundering for a bit and left this at a one-possession game for much longer than it really should have been.
There was a real opportunity, a final one, for the Eagles to turn it around.
But they wanted no part of it.
Wrote Tom Ley over at Defector:
That portion of the game, in which the Eagles had multiple opportunities to tie it up while the Buccaneers swooned, defines this punchless Eagles season more than any of the missed tackles can. In the middle of their nightmare, the Eagles were given a chance to wake up. All it would have taken was one good drive, one touchdown, one memory of how this team played when it started the season 5-0, and the story could have changed. Sports are usually hard to predict because people are hard to predict; a team can go from looking defeated and stepped-on in one moment to triumphant in the next for no other reason than the players on the field changed things. The Eagles didn't do that. They came into this game looking like a defeated team, played like one, and then left like one. [Defector]
Seriously, what was that?
Jalen Hurts got blitzed relentlessly, again, and somehow the Eagles looked caught completely off guard by it, again.
There was no adjustment. No shift in approach. The Eagles' offense stayed married to long-developing plays, bafflingly timed and horrendously executed screens, and just overall incoherent playcalling.
And shocker: They looked like an absolute trainwreck.
Brian Baldinger with how bad it really was on the tape:
.@Eagles offense is a train wreck..No wonder why they are the most blitzed team in the NFL. They have NO answer for the blitz. #BaldysBreakdowns pic.twitter.com/n9SX3SRWLl
— Brian Baldinger (@BaldyNFL) January 16, 2024
.@Eagles anyone care to explain this offense? Do they truly practice to look this inept…How to fix this? Suggestions? #BaldysBreakdowns pic.twitter.com/ZXmssHB7oc
— Brian Baldinger (@BaldyNFL) January 16, 2024
If DeVonta Smith wasn't making a highlight real play downfield somewhere, then the Eagles just weren't going anywhere Monday night.
How did this team even put up 31 points two weeks ago?
The Eagles' tackling was so bad it might've caused Ray Lewis emotional damage.
Appearing on ESPN 2's Manningcast for the fourth quarter, here's Lewis' reaction to Trey Palmer's backbreaking touchdown, or more accurately James Bradberry's total whiff on the tackle, in real time.
Ray Lewis... NOT happy with the Eagles defense
— Omaha Productions (@OmahaProd) January 16, 2024
(cc: @RayLewis) pic.twitter.com/oSdHRezebP
Any chance he can run them through some tackling drills in the offseason? Or even suit up again at linebacker at this rate?
The offense collapsed and the defense imploded under Nick Sirianni's watch, and no decision he made fixed either. Arguably, he made them even worse.
Shane Steichen isn't there to call the offensive plays anymore, which became painfully clear, and the hypeman, trash-talking act got stale real quick once the Eagles started spiraling.
So remove that latter part from the equation and what is it that Nick Sirianni does here?
A much more important question to be asking now that some seriously notable head coaching candidates are available.
Wrote Ben Solak over at The Ringer:
The question on the mind of every Eagles watcher, from the average fan to owner Jeffrey Lurie, is that question: What does Nick do here? What value does he bring to the team? If he isn’t calling plays; if his coaching adjustments, either in the offseason or midseason, aren’t working; if his culture is crumbling and the team can’t recover from a loss … what exactly is Sirianni doing?
The Eagles have an aging roster and face a difficult decision. They can push for one more year of contention, or accept an inevitable youth movement and subsequent reload. Do the Eagles have confidence in Sirianni to lead them in either direction?
Mike Vrabel is unemployed right now. So is Pete Carroll. Those are some good coaches. There’s another one—William Belichick, I think his name is? The Eagles will do their homework, for sure. This is not an organization to sit on their thumbs and do nothing—it’s never been the way of Lurie and GM Howie Roseman.
Change is coming to Philadelphia. The only question is what sort of change it is. [The Ringer]
With word breaking that this is indeed it for Jason Kelce, his iconic Super Bowl parade speech one more time:
Add "greatest Super Bowl parade speech of all-time" to @JasonKelce's Hall Of Fame resume. 💚😂
— NFL (@NFL) January 16, 2024
(via @NFLonFOX) pic.twitter.com/kbiZGT4Ghm
There will never be another day like that freezing one down the parkway, never a team quite like that magical 2017 one, and never another player like Kelce.
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