Sports

The Eagles and Packers were tied 0-0 at halftime on Monday night. That doesn't happen very often.

Monday night marked the first time in almost two full years that an NFL game has been scoreless at halftime.

Oddly enough, the last time an NFL game was scoreless at halftime, it happened twice on the same day: On December 10, 2023, the Jets and Texans were tied 0-0 at halftime, and the Vikings and Raiders were also tied 0-0 at halftime.

Overall, though, it's a rare occurrence: In the last 10 years, only five NFL games have been 0-0 at the end of the second quarter. Scoreless halftime games are about a 1-in-500 occurrence in the NFL, or around 0.2 percent of games.

Unsurprisingly, 0-0 halftime scores have become much less common as NFL offenses have grown more sophisticated and rules favoring the offense have been passed. What was once commonplace in the old days of the NFL has now become the rarity that was on display on Monday night, a first half in which neither team could get on the scoreboard.

After the Vikings committed eight false starts in Sunday's loss to the Ravens, their running back Aaron Jones said that the Ravens were "playing a little game" on the defensive line to cause some of the issues.

Jones said that the Ravens were making "move calls" that could be taken for Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy's cadence, but head coach Kevin O'Connell said he did not hear anything like that from players during the game. On Monday, Ravens head coach John Harbaugh said he agreed with his colleague that "it wasn't anything we were doing."

"I went back and I watched it, because we didn't have a gameplan for that," Harbaugh said, via a transcript from the team. "If we did, I would've been happy, but we're not going to do anything illegal. If you stem, you make a move call, which is what you do; you're allowed to say, 'Move.' You're not allowed to say 'set,' or 'hut,' or anything else. Or a cadence, which we never have done. But then I watched all of them, and [on] none of them did we stem. Not one did we move.

Harbaugh suggested the Vikings' own pre-snap shifts and cadence variations had a hand in the unusual number of false starts for the home team and that leaves it as an issue for O'Connell to address as they move on with their season.

Edge rusher Jaelan Phillips called getting traded to the Eagles the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him and he made General Manager Howie Roseman look smart for acquiring him in Green Bay on Monday night.

Phillips punctuated his Eagles debut by stuffing Packers running back Josh Jacobs on a fourth-and-1 with 90 seconds left in the game. The stop helped seal a 10-7 road win for his new team and it was part of an effort that head coach Nick Sirianni called "very disruptive" in his postgame press conference.

Phillips had six tackles, two quarterback hits, a tackle for loss and a fumble recovery in a memorable first outing with his new team.

"He loves football. He loves working," Sirianni said. "You can just see the way he was running around at practice, his motor is constantly, constantly running, just pushing to get better. It was a really big impact that he made tonight for his first game as an Eagle."

In his own postgame comments, Phillips said he "just wanted to earn the respect of my teammates and the coaches and the fans and everybody." He accomplished that on Monday night and he'll get a chance to play in front of the home crowd for the first time against the Lions on Sunday night in Week 11.