Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Cincinnati Bengals @ Carolina Panthers
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Denver Broncos @ New York Jets
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Jacksonville Jaguars @ Houston Texans
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Minnesota Vikings @ Green Bay Packers
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM New Orleans Saints @ Atlanta Falcons
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Philadelphia Eagles @ Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Pittsburgh Steelers @ Indianapolis Colts
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Los Angeles Rams @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-09-29 4:05PM New England Patriots @ San Francisco 49ers
Sun 2024-09-29 4:05PM Washington Commanders @ Arizona Cardinals
Sun 2024-09-29 4:25PM Cleveland Browns @ Las Vegas Raiders
Sun 2024-09-29 4:25PM Kansas City Chiefs @ Los Angeles Chargers
Sun 2024-09-29 8:20PM Buffalo Bills @ Baltimore Ravens
Mon 2024-09-30 7:30PM Tennessee Titans @ Miami Dolphins
Mon 2024-09-30 8:15PM Seattle Seahawks @ Detroit Lions
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Notes -
The Eagles came away with a sloppy roller coaster of a win in New Orleans on Sunday, in which Jalen Carter and Saquon Barkley saved head coach Nick Sirianni's job. Watching it with my parents, even the dog could feel the tension. The victory itself might be pretty pyrrhic, with the team losing their star RT, starting RG, WR2 and WR3 with WR1 already on the DL.
I still find it highly likely that Nick won't survive the season. While the defense showed up in a big way on Sunday afternoon, the offense was suddenly nowhere to be found. While the weekly power rankings have the Eagles in the top 10, they have yet to show out convincingly in a win, or even in a loss. Each game has been riddled with errors, injuries, and at least one major portion of the team (Pass rush, pass coverage, special teams, passing offense) has disappeared for important portions of each game.
The Eagles made the Super Bowl two seasons ago on an excellent run where their offense lead by Hurts seemed without a clear counter and their pass rush was close to setting records. They then started off last season with a 10-1 record despite looking shaky in many of their wins, with Hurts becoming increasingly turnover prone. The bottom fell out after a Game of the Year win over the Bills, and the team would limp into the playoffs winning only one more game, before getting pantsed in the playoffs by Tampa Bay. They've started this year with three close and uneven games, beating out GB in Brazil, losing to Atlanta at home, and narrowly defeating NO in the Superdome. All three games have been riddled with errors.
This week, a win is a win, but Nick's terrible decision making was on full display. Nick was coaching for his job, if they lost to NO and went away to Tampa on a bad swing he wouldn't have survived the Bye week. And it showed, Nick made bafflingly inconsistent and poor decisions. He attempted a near-impossible field goal that set up NO on the fifty, called a trick-play off the Brotherly Shove that lost them at least three points, watched his team get an embarrassing punt blocked, and has been inconsistent in the level of aggression and analysis he's going with for the whole season now. Nick is clearly costing the team points right now.
At the same time, while Jalen Carter was trying to win the game single-handed on defense (The People's Governor ) Jalen Hurts was trying to give it away on offense. Jalen Hurts threw an interception in the endzone and had a bad fumble that killed a drive, each of which could easily have lost the game.. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln said the play was excellent, with Hurts seeming to discover how to scramble again and hitting a few huge passes to win the game. Because anything worth doing is worth doing with made up statistics, Hurts graded out in the mid 80s on PFF the last three seasons as a starter, so far this season he's in the low 60s. Whispers in Philly are starting to compare him to another Eagles QB who had a few great seasons before signing a huge contract and going into steep and turnover prone decline: Carson Wentz, Hurts' predecessor, whose albatross contract and poor performance more or less ended the prior era of Eagles' football.
Some Eagles fans are still confused as to order of operations in this game though, which I think does offer a window into decision making under uncertainty, and how regulations distort decisions.
We can't know what this team is for certain outside of what they've shown on the field, which is chaotic mediocrity for a season and change now. Possible realities: A. the team is bad and lacks talent everywhere and must be rebuilt from the ground up, B. the team is talented all around but Jalen Hurts is unplayably turnover prone, C. the team is talented but Nick Sirianni's coaching is holding them back, or D. the team is talented and they'll figure it out. As a matter of probability, each seems about equally likely, but as a matter of decision making within constraints faced by the Eagles, only C or D matter.
The team is resource limited by the NFL salary cap, and their current investments in players. Particularly, Jalen Hurts is signed for $255mm, which for complicated salary cap reasons actually becomes a totally absurd number if they cut Hurts and remains manageable only as long as they keep negotiating extensions with him. The team is set up to win now, they don't have a lot of development assets on the team, their offensive weapons are mostly players in or past their prime and mostly well paid. They have to dance with them what brung them. If they wanted to rebuild this team from the ground up, eating the void years in the Hurts contract alone, would take years of salary cap hell. Plus extra years of losing to obtain the draft capital to pick up a potentially good quarterback, who will just be a roll of the dice anyway, which might send them back into QB limbo.
As a result of all that, A can be safely ignored. If the whole team is really bad, like papier-mache secondary and d-line that can't get a sack bad, it's not fixable in the near future, it's a multi-year process. B can also be ignored, because the structure of the contract and the QB market means that Hurts can't really be fired, at most he might be tradable in the off-season, but that leaves the rest of the team hanging without a QB. Neither A nor B are actually a path to anywhere.
So the choice is purely between C and D. It doesn't matter whether Jalen Hurts is good or not, it only matters whether Nick is doing everything he can to pull the team together. The question is purely whether the team is good with Nick, or whether the coaching is holding them back. No other significant aspect of the team can be improved during the season.
We'll probably find out in Tampa. Go Birds.
In other league news, I would love to see Dakota and Dem Boys get buried by the Giants, and I'm rooting for the GEQBUS.
From the Saints side one of the popular narratives has been about how Dennis Allen has lost the locker room the fake kneel play against the Falcons last year being the proof and/or hitch. Long standing rumor has been that Erik McCoy was the dude who was actually running our offense, and the fact that the Saints went to shit the moment he went down would seem to reinforce that.
The Saints did seem unmoored as a team. That penning penalty against Slay was just weird, unless there was more going on in game that I didn't see on the broadcast.
Wish us luck against the lesser birds ;-)
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