The Linc

Let’s get to the Philadelphia Eagles links …

Point the blame for latest Eagles meltdown directly at Nick Sirianni – NBCSP
The unthinkable has become the norm. Nightmare endings have become inevitable. It keeps happening and there doesn’t seem to be anything Nick Sirianni can do to stop it. The players have changed. A bunch of ‘em. Twenty-two guys who started a game last year are gone. The coaches have changed. Both coordinators and half a dozen position coaches are new this year. The one thing that hasn’t changed, the biggest common denominator, is Sirianni, and when we start to assign blame for yet another preposterous nightmare Eagles loss, that’s where we have to start. Because his job right now is setting the culture, preparing the football team, making the big decisions that set the tone for what we see on the field. And what we’ve seen on the field way too often lately is disastrous.

NFL Week 2 Under Review: The Surprising Saints and Nick Sirianni’s Big Blunder – The Ringer
Sirianni has been stripped of almost all of his responsibilities. He doesn’t do the game-planning or play-calling on offense. He doesn’t hire the coordinators. And he doesn’t have autonomy on roster decisions. What he does handle is game management—and he needs to nail it, especially considering that he works for Jeffrey Lurie, who has long been forward-thinking when it comes to analytics. Sirianni turtled in a key spot on Monday night, and it cost his team.

A closer look at Nick Sirianni’s faulty decision-making that cost the Eagles – BGN
This brings us to the final poor game management decision: kicking a FG to turn a 1 score game into a 1 score game. It is 4th and 3 at the ATL 10-yard line with 1:39 on the clock. The Eagles make the decision to kick a FG, which not only eliminates the possibility of winning the game on 1 play, it also gives up 20 yards of field position (via the ensuing kickoff/touchback) with no time runoff in a situation where time is paramount, and the Falcons have no timeouts. Per ESPN analytics, the probability of winning the game if you go for it on 4th down is 95% while the probability of winning if you kick a FG drops to 90%. But that is baking in the fact that you could convert on 4th down. What if we remove that from the equation entirely? What if we input the scenario of giving the Falcons the ball at the 10-yard line down 3 or the 30-yard line down 6? The result is a 7% win probability in the former and a 10% win probability in the latter. Simply put, the decision to kick a FG, even if you make it, hurts your win probability more than failing a 4th down attempt.

Late-game decision making in the Eagles’ loss to the Falcons turned up the heat on Nick Sirianni – Inquirer
Penalties fall on the coach, too, because too many can be an indictment of how practices are run. How are the Eagles still getting called for illegal offensive linemen downfield on run-pass options? Wasn’t that a first season issue? But here we are three years into Sirianni’s tenure and the Eagles were flagged three times for the infraction. “Some of them are on us as coaches; some of them are on a player going too fast,” Sirianni said. “We coach that, not to go too fast. But some of them are on us in certain scenarios when we call them.”Sirianni was more aggressive on fourth downs earlier in the game. He went for it on the Eagles’ second series on fourth-and-4 at the Falcons’ 9. But he had Hurts drop on both third and fourth down. Why not run it on third knowing he would gamble on fourth?

Handing out 10 awards from the Eagles-Falcons game – PhillyVoice
6) The ‘No Resistance’ Award: The Eagles’ run defense. Of course, it’s hard to rush the passer when you’re getting gashed by the run. Bijan Robinson and Tyler Allgeier combined for 23 carries for 150 yards (6.5 yards per carry). The Packers ran for 7.8 yards per carry against the Eagles’ defense Week 1. That’s an ugly developing trend. The entire Eagles defensive front is playing the run poorly, particularly Huff, but more alarmingly, where are Jordan Davis and Jalen Carter?

A Bad Loss – Iggles Blitz
The DL was invisible. Atlanta has an underrated OL, but they shouldn’t manhandle the Eagles the way they did. That is incredibly troubling. Kirk Cousins had all day to throw on the final drive. The Eagles knew they would be passing and still couldn’t get close. The holes in the zone coverage are massive. The defense feels like a group of individuals rather than a cohesive unit right now. That has to change. The tackling was bad. Again. Nick Sirianni and his coaching staff have a lot of issues to fix on a short week. And they have the hottest team in the league on the schedule for the next game. That’s not ideal at all.

NFL Week 2: Biggest questions, takeaways for every game – ESPN
Eye-popping stat: Cousins was pressured on just 2-of-14 dropbacks (14%) in the first half, the lowest rate he’s faced in any half since Week 1 of 2023.

2024 NFL Season, Week 2: What We Learned from Falcons’ win over Eagles on Monday night – NFL.com
Philly needs to clean it up. The Eagles will look back at this one with significant regret for more than just how the game ended. Philadelphia had a number of positive gains wiped out by penalties — including three illegal man downfield flags — and even the positive plays that stood occasionally came with a catch (e.g., Hurts’ scramble and spike, which drew a delay of game penalty). It’s early, and these kinds of minor errors tend to happen. But nine penalties (accepted for 53 yards) are simply too many for a team that intends to contend. Philadelphia largely played well enough to win, but its mismanagement at the end and its errors — and this is being written after the Eagles avoided a penalty for Chauncey Gardner-Johnson ‘s slight removal of his dislodged helmet after a key fourth-down stop — cannot happen frequently if it wants to regain the NFC East throne.

Spadaro: 4 key plays that determined the Falcons-Eagles game – PE.com
Play 3 – 32 seconds remaining, Falcons score game-winning TD. It was really a bunch of plays, but the final one was a Cousins touchdown pass in the right corner of the end zone to wide receiver Drake London on a third-and-5 play from the Philadelphia 7-yard line to tie the game, and then Younghoe Koo booted an extra point from 48 yards out – Atlanta was penalized 15 yards after the touchdown – and the Falcons had the lead. “Very disappointed, definitely, with myself at the end of that game,” said cornerback Darius Slay, who was in coverage on London on the touchdown. “I’m hurt with that one, man. That’s my guy. That play, for sure, is my fault. Eyes in the backfield, just trying to do more than I should have been doing.” The Eagles’ defense didn’t get anything going in that final drive after an otherwise bend-but-don’t-break kind of night. To that point, the Falcons had just 315 total yards of offense and while the Atlanta running game gained 154 yards and averaged more than 5 1/2 yards per carry, Cousins didn’t find much downfield success in the passing game. That all changed in the final drive.

Kirk Cousins gave Falcons fans something to believe in on game-winning drive vs Eagles – SB Nation
The cornerbacks bump over, and Darius Slay slides to the outside over London in response. While both Pitts and London break inside on a pair of slant routes, London jab steps to the inside before breaking to the front pylon. At the exact moment, London makes his break, Slay has his eyes on the other two routes, and that is all Cousins and London need to connect on the game-winning touchdown. Slay conceded as much on social media after the game.

Jason Kelce’s extended visit to MNF booth surely had Falcons fans seething – PFT
By the time things got really interesting, that’s when Kelce should have been in the booth. Wouldn’t it have been great to hear what he had to say about the decision to pass on third and three from the Atlanta 10 with less than two minutes to play and the Falcons out of timeouts? Would he have been critical, or would he have been a (former) company man? Why not have him on standby for the postgame show? It would have been a perfect opportunity for Kelce to give raw, real commentary about why the Eagles did what they did. And whether they should have done something differently.

Falcons vs. Eagles recap: Sweet, sweet victory – The Falcoholic
We all saw it coming, didn’t we? When the Philadelphia Eagles capped off a long, frustrating scoring drive and then punched in a two point conversion to take a three point lead, there was a sense that the same old Atlanta Falcons anti-magic was at work. Despite fighting like hell and showing impressive resolve and hanging in, the Falcons were going to need a miracle to win. After a drive where mishaps featured and the team couldn’t convert a fourth down, the Eagles had the ball and a chance to salt it away. It felt, as it so often has in recent years, like it was over. But then, somehow, it wasn’t. I’ll admit to a stirring of hope when Saquon Barkley dropped a third down pass he should have had, forcing the Eagles to settle for a field goal with enough time on the clock for the Falcons to score even without any timeouts. It was a big ask and a big dream, but it felt like it was a shade less than impossible. I held my breath, and reader, I did not really breathe again for several minutes.

The McCarthy Chronicles: Same old song and dance for Cowboys after Saints loss – Blogging The Boys
The fact that it came against a Kyle Shanahan disciple – of which there are many across the league – and that this scheme was the defense’s undoing begs the question of whether anything has changed at all for the Cowboys. More importantly, will it ever change? If the Cowboys still can’t stop this offense, they’ll for sure lose in Week 8 this year when they face Shanahan himself, and they’ll for sure lose in the playoffs when they run up against Shanahan or Matt LaFleur or even Kubiak and the Saints. That sobering reality may be setting in for the Cowboys now. A bounce-back win over the Ravens would feel nice, but it still won’t answer any questions about stopping this kind of offense. And until that question gets answered, the ceiling for this Cowboys team remains low.

How can the New York Giants fix their defensive woes? – Big Blue View
A team can’t get into pass-rushing situations or prevent long, time-consuming drives if it can’t adequately defend the run. The Giants, as we saw Sunday when they surrendered 215 rushing yards and allowed the Washington Commanders to keep the ball for an astounding 37:32. Asked what the biggest problem with the defense was on Sunday against the Commanders, head coach Brian Daboll went right to the run defense and the thing that goes hand-in-hand with it. “!‘d say two things. Usually this happens for run defense, two things, tackling and then run fits,” Daboll said. “So those are two things that we stress them every week but put an added emphasis on them this week. “We just [have] to do a good job of accounting for all our gaps … The fundamentals of tackling and then the discipline of gap control are two areas we’re going to continue to work on.”

Commanders’ offense establishing an identity behind Brian Robinson and Austin Ekeler – Hogs Haven
Whether intentional or not, Commanders’ running backs Austin Ekeler and Brian Robinson Jr. have emerged as the offense’s top playmakers surrounding Jayden Daniels. Robinson and Ekeler have combined for 372 yards from scrimmage, 48 percent of Washington’s offense. It hasn’t been perfect, as Washington is coming from a game where they did not score a touchdown. However, if they can continue building on its strengths as the season progresses, scoring touchdowns should eventually come with the growth. Robinson, who ran for 133 yards on 17 carries against New York, saw a career-high in rushing yards and his 40-yard run. If their usage rate remains consistent, offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury can quickly propel Robinson and Ekeler into a top duo in the NFL.