Eagles OC answers questions about shaky start for passing offense originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
The Eagles had a shot play dialed up on the very first snap in Kansas City and A.J. Brown was streaking open down the right sideline.
The protection just didn’t hold up.
“Yeah, we had a shot,” Eagles OC Kevin Patullo said. “It didn’t happen unfortunately, and we were in a second-and-long and we just had to play it out from there.”
The Eagles ended up beating the Chiefs 20-17 on Sunday and improved to 2-0 on the season. But the passing game is going to need to improve and everyone knows it.
While Jalen Hurts has been efficient through the first two games of the season and hasn’t turned the football over, the Eagles aren’t pushing the ball downfield. The numbers back up what your eyes have seen.
Hurts’ average depth of target through two games is just 5.9 yards, which ranks 33rd among 34 NFL quarterbacks with at least 20 dropbacks, according to ProFootballFocus. In total, the Eagles have just 238 passing yards and barely any explosives.
The Eagles define explosive plays as any run of 10+ yards and any pass of 16+ yards. Through two games, the Eagles have just two explosive passing plays: The 51-yarder to Jahan Dotson in the opener and the 28-yarder to DeVonta Smith in Week 2.
“When you look at when we game plan and stuff like that, that’s obviously always the first thing we do is, ‘How do we want to push the ball down the field?’” Patullo said. “As a staff, we work really hard on the plan, especially these next couple days, to put that on there and that’s a part of it.
“Sometimes, in-game, it just doesn’t happen. It’s definitely something we want to do. It’s not something we’re avoiding. I know going forward, we have the plan in place, and if it comes up, it’ll definitely happen.”
While the Eagles’ passing offense hasn’t been particularly good through two games, it has been efficient. Hurts has thrown for just 253 yards and hasn’t thrown a touchdown pass yet but he also hasn’t turned the ball over. And that matters.
The Eagles are always focused on their turnover margin and are +2 through two games. Each of the two takeaways from Vic Fangio’s defense has been crucial against the Cowboys and Chiefs. Based on the way Sunday’s game unfolded, the Eagles though it was wise to stick with a conservative plan on offense.
But how do the Eagles balance winning the turnover battle with the emphasis on getting explosives?
“It’s a fine line, right?” Patullo said. “Because turnovers ultimately are a huge deciding factor and if you count the fourth-down stop we had, that’s another turnover. So, turnovers really can change the game quickly. Explosive plays are great and you always want to try to get them. It makes it way easier to score. It makes it way more efficient, obviously, for an offense to move the ball down the field.
“But there is a fine line because you want to make sure those explosive plays aren’t coming at a cost where you’re at a high risk for a turnover in a game like that.”
It seems obvious the Eagles will need to strike a better balance going forward. Because even though they’re 2-0 and have done the things necessary to beat the Cowboys and Chiefs, future games might require a more explosive pass game.
Through a couple of games, the Eagles are starting to form some offensive tendencies. To oversimplify, they have shown that they like to pass from shotgun and run from under-center and pistol.
“I went through this morning some of the self-scout stuff and we get all those numbers and you try to counteract those going in, and sometimes situationally the plays pop up where you’re just not able to do that,” Patullo said. “But definitely, it is definitely on our mind as far as when you plan those things, you always want to make sure, ‘Oh, I have a tendency I can break.’ Definitely need to do that this week.”
On the other hand, the Eagles have played just two games so the sample size is pretty small. And the only way to break tendencies is to have tendencies in the first place.
Does Patullo have a philosophy of when to call those tendency-breakers?
“So if something’s working, it may come up, it may not,” he said. “You may go into a game and say like, ‘Hey, this is the play we’ve got to break the tendency with’, but then it never occurs because it’s not that kind of game for it. So it’s a little bit of a back and forth guessing game, like in-game, sometimes it appears, sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe it’s a week from now. You know what I mean? It doesn’t have to be that game right away sometimes.”