Eagles’ failure against blitz doesn’t bode well for playoff success

Eagles’ failure against blitz doesn’t bode well for playoff success originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia

Jalen Hurts gets blitzed more than just about any other player in the NFL and the Eagles on Sunday were facing a defensive coordinator known for heating up quarterbacks.

So it wasn’t a great sign in Week 18 when the Eagles looked like they had never seen a blitz before.

It was bad.

“Obviously anytime you don’t handle the things like that the way you should, that’s always going to start with me and putting them in positions to make plays,” head coach Nick Sirianni said on Monday. “And (there are) so many different ways that you can handle the blitz. There’s many different things that you can do.

“And, the ones that we chose to do yesterday, they weren’t good enough and so that’s going to be on me. Because it starts with the plan that we put together and so it wasn’t good enough yesterday. We have our ways that we’re going to fix it. We have our ways that we’re going to move forward with it. But, yesterday, I’m 100% going to take that on what it looked like yesterday.”

While Hurts could certainly handle some of these situations better, he didn’t get much help from scheme or play-calling in this game. The troubling thing is that dealing with the blitz has been a problem with this offense, with this quarterback dating back to 2021. Sometimes it’s OK; other times it’s a disaster.

And in the final regular season game of their third year together, it was a glaring issue.

Even though there were nearly 10 snaps where he should be on “Alert Hot” (🚨🔥) mode, this is *technically* the only snap in which Hurts is actually “Hot” (a rusher is unaccounted for in protection to a side). It goes exactly how you’d expect in this system. I’m not absolving him… pic.twitter.com/xMsUC6oTJj

— Honest NFL (@TheHonestNFL) January 9, 2024

Hurts didn’t play very long on Sunday before the Eagles were getting blown out and Sirianni pulled his…


Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/eagles-failure-against-blitz-doesnt-135954439.html

Author : NBC Sports Philadelphia

Publish date : 2024-01-09 13:59:54

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