September 02, 2024
In Week 1 of the 2024 regular season, the Philadelphia Eagles will travel to Brazil to host a "home" game against the Green Bay Packers. Here are our five matchups to watch.
The Packers have surrounded Jordan Love with a bunch of promising young receivers. Their 2023 stats are below, with their ages in parentheses.
| Packers WRs and TEs | Rec | Yards | YPC | TD |
| WR Jayden Reed (24) | 64 | 793 | 12.4 | 8 |
| WR Romeo Doubs (24) | 59 | 674 | 11.4 | 8 |
| WR Dontayvion Wicks (23) | 39 | 581 | 14.9 | 4 |
| WR Christian Watson (25) | 28 | 422 | 15.1 | 5 |
| TE Tucker Kraft (23) | 31 | 355 | 11.5 | 2 |
| TE Luke Musgrave (23) | 34 | 352 | 10.4 | 1 |
| WR Bo Melton (25) | 16 | 218 | 13.6 | 1 |
| WR Malik Heath (24) | 15 | 125 | 8.3 | 1 |
The starters will likely be Watson, Doubs, and Reed. Watson is a height/weight/speed freak of nature, and probably their biggest threat. His stats above were in nine games. His spider chart:
With so many young targets on the roster, the Packers could conceivably be a more difficult team to prepare for as their receivers grow into seasoned NFL players.
Meanwhile, the Eagles' pass defense was atrocious in 2023, and they made the secondary a major priority this offseason, signing S Chauncey Gardner-Johnson in free agency and selecting Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean with their first two picks in the 2024 draft.
Darius Slay remains the CB1 and will start on the outside. It is also clear that Mitchell will start in some capacity, whether that's strictly as a slot corner, or if he starts on the outside and then moves inside in nickel. It is likely that Isaiah Rodgers will have a starting role (at least in nickel) on the outside.
The Eagles will face talented receiving corps all season long, and this will be the first of many tests.
We'll also note here that the Packers' defensive coordinator a season ago was Joe Barry, who ran a version of Vic Fangio's scheme. Love saw plenty of what Fangio likes to do in practice last year.
Aaron Jones and AJ Dillon have been the Packers' running back duo over the last three seasons, but Jones left in free agency and Dillon's season is over after he was placed on IR with a neck injury.
The Packers' new running back duo is Josh Jacobs and MarShawn Lloyd.
Jacobs led the NFL with 1653 rushing yards in 2022. He had a heavy workload, with 340 carries and 37 receptions (377 touches). He sputtered in 2023, when he rushed 233 times for 805 yards (3.5 yards per carry).
Lloyd is a third-round rookie out of USC, where he rushed for 7.1 yards per carry in his final season, but had an alarming number of fumbles (8) on a low number of career carries (291). That's a fumble every 36 carries. Eagles defenders should be mindful to get their Peanut Punches on.
The Eagles' rush defense in 2023 was a tale of two seasons.
In eight of their first nine games, the Eagles held their opponents to under 100 rushing yards. They were allowing an average of 66.7 rushing yards per game, best in the NFL. Thereafter, they became one of the worst run defenses in the NFL, giving up at least 100 rushing yards to each of their last 9 opponents, and an average of 142 rushing yards allowed per game.
There are a number of factors at play when projecting the Eagles' run defense in 2024:
We'll get our first glimpses of a concern area within the Eagles defense right off the bat.
After the retirement of LT David Bakhtiari and the losses of Jon Runyan and Yosh Nijman in free agency, the Packers' offensive line will likely look like this:
| LT | LG | C | RG | RT |
| Rasheed Walker | Elgton Jenkins | Josh Myers | Jordan Morgan (R) | Zach Tom |
The Packers have an average offensive line. Jenkins is a solid veteran, and Tom is a developing into a very good young tackle. The three concern areas are as follows:
• Morgan is a rookie first-round selection who really only played LT in college at Arizona. He is not only moving to guard, but also moving from the left side to the right side. In his rookie debut, he's going to be seeing his share of Jalen Carter. If I'm the Packers, that would be my biggest concern in this matchup.
• Walker was a seventh-round selection in 2022 who did not play as a rookie, but started 15 games in 2023. He was a below average starter, but he's young and could reasonably be an ascending player. I imagine the Eagles will give both Josh Sweat and Bryce Huff reps on that side against Walker, but it'll primarily be Sweat.
• Myers is entering his fourth season, and has not yet developed into a good starting center. PFF had Myers down for 5 sacks allowed in 2023, a high number for a center. If Jordan Davis can't do some damage Week 1, that would be cause for concern for his 2024 outlook.
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Clark is one of the NFL's most underrated players. In 2023, Clark had 44 tackles (9 for loss), 7.5 sacks, 3 batted passes, and 2 forced fumbles. Highlight reel here.
Becton is moving to RG after playing the first four seasons of his NFL career at OT. After playing in just one game in 2021 and missing the entire 2022 season, Becton stayed healthy in 2023 while playing RT for the Jets, but PFF had him down for 12 sacks allowed and 16 (!) penalties.
The Packers move Clark around, but I imagine they'll be eager to get him matched up against Becton.
On a side note, the Packers have a pair of very good edge rushers in Rashan Gary and Preston Smith (Gary especially), but that is strength-on-strength, as they'll face off against the Eagles' star OT duo of Jordan Mailata and Lane Johnson.
In the Eagles' regular season finale last season the Eagles faced Wink Martindale and the horrid New York Giants, and there was no mystery to what the Giants were going to try to do to the Eagles defensively. They were going to blitz Jalen Hurts, early and often. The Eagles were wholly unprepared for it, as Hurts looked to extend plays by running out of the pocket and away from blitzes, trying to buy time for vertical routes to develop down the field before eventually throwing the ball away. As usual, there were no hot routes or other mechanisms to allow Hurts to beat the blitz by getting the ball out quickly.
Against Todd Bowles and the Bucs in the playoffs, once again it was crystal clear that the Eagles were going to see a lot of blitzes, and sure enough, they did, with similarly bad results.
A week ago, The Athletic's Mike Sando published his yearly (excellent) "QB Tiers" article, and unsurprisingly Hurts' ability to handle the blitz was broached.
"The word is out there, if you run zero blitz against Hurts, or show zero and back everyone out, he will panic," one coach said. "That has to change. They lose Jason Kelce, who handled the protections, basically did everything, and you bring in a coordinator who likes to drop back. It will be interesting."
As noted above, the Packers' defensive coordinator last year was Joe Barry. He was replaced this offseason by Jeff Hafley, formerly the head coach at Boston College. Hafley has a reputation for employing an exotic blitz package, though he doesn't necessarily blitz in bulk.
Heading into 2024, guess what! Defensive coordinators are going to blitz Hurts and the Eagles' offense until they prove that they can consistently beat it, and that'll very likely begin Week 1 against the Packers.
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