In their Week 4 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Philadelphia Eagles forgot how to tackle, as short Buccaneers gains turned into long ones, and drives that might have otherwise stalled instead led to points.
NFL Next Gen Stats had the Eagles down for 16 missed tackles. Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said on Tuesday that the Eagles counted 15. I took a look myself, and found 13. Here are those 13 missed tackles, in thread form, via Twitter:
I had Nakobe Dean down for four missed tackles; Reed Blankenship accounted for three.
The Eagles missed a lot of tackles against the Packers Week 1 as well, so this wasn't exactly a new issue, though they did tackle well Week 3 in New Orleans against the Saints.
"A lot of times, we left our feet too early," Fangio said. "Sometimes, we didn't wrap up well enough."
The Eagles don't tackle in practice, either in training camp or during the regular season. Most teams don't. However, the Eagles are on the far more cautious end of the spectrum when it comes to playing starters during the preseason games, when players might benefit from getting some tackling reps.
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"You emphasize it through film study, through practice drills, and better technique," Fangio said when asked how tackling can improve when there's no tackling in practice.
The Eagles will have some extra time this week to correct some of their fundamental tackling issues on their bye.
"This will be the week that we relook at some of drills that we're doing," Nick Sirianni said. "You try to do as many drills as you possibly can do that simulate tackling as much as you possibly can. Tackling is something that's difficult for the entire league to really simulate how you do that. Because you're not doing the thing live. Well, that’s the same thing with ball security. You're more susceptible to fumble the football as you're truly getting tackled. So, all these fundamentals – it’s a long season, and I think what you have to do is, you have to put your guys in positions to simulate it while also protecting your guys to make sure that you have your guys every Sunday.
"I think what I'll do definitely this week is, okay, let's look at, we know that the issue – what are the common themes of the tackles we're missing? And I’ve got a pretty good idea what they are. How do we simulate that in drills? How do we show it in meetings, from around the league, from us, so you emphasis it. And that will be the process of what we go through this week.
"But with the amount of tackles we missed in this last game, it led to a lot of extra yards by them. And you're going to miss a couple tackles each game, but that wasn't to our standard. And there were different circumstances of why that we need to get corrected. And any time I talk about – I'm so passionate about details and fundamentals that that hurts me when we don't tackle well. Because I know how much time we put into it."
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