Why did Eagles offense evaporate in 2nd half vs. Broncos? originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
The Eagles did some good things on offense Sunday.
Until they didn’t.
That’s the most frustrating part of what happened in their 21-17 loss to the Broncos at Lincoln Financial Field. It’s confounding how the offense can look so good one moment and so awful the next.
And as they quickly try to regroup before facing the Giants on the road Thursday night, it’s the missed opportunities that will sit with them from this loss.
“Yeah, it’s not a capability thing,” quarterback Jalen Hurts said. “We don’t have a capability issue. We know what we’re capable of. We’re just not doing those things yet. But we will.”
The Eagles gave the Broncos credit after Denver came back in the fourth quarter to leave the Linc with a win and hand the Eagles their first loss of the 2025 season. But the Eagles also let it be known that they lost the game with self-inflicted errors, poorly timed penalties and missed chances.
After scoring a touchdown on the first drive of the second half to take a two-touchdown lead, the offense evaporated. Their next four drives resulted in punts and three of those drives were 3-and-outs.
“We gotta play four quarters,” receiver A.J. Brown said. “We have to stop putting a lot of pressure on our defense because they’re playing really good. We just gotta pull our end. At times we did and then the second half we just stalled out. It’s a lot of things to work on and get better.”
There were so many chances for the Eagles to get unstuck in the second half but they failed to do so. There was the illegal shift on 4th-and-4 to negate a huge first-down pass to DeVonta Smith. An illegal man downfield penalty on an RPO. Missed deep shots to Brown and Jahan Dotson. A missed DPI call on the final drive. A near-catch on the game’s final play.
So many chances and the Eagles couldn’t get it done.
One play that will really linger in the minds of Eagles fans was a deep shot from Hurts to Brown late in the third quarter. At the time, the Eagles were already up 17-3 and if Hurts and Brown connected, it likely would have been a 61-yard touchdown. It would have been the dagger.
“From my point of view, it was just a miss,” Brown said.
“That situation in that play, that was a shot,” Hurts said. “So you either hit it or you don’t and we didn’t hit that one. We’ll watch the tape and we’ll get the opportunity to and we’ll learn from that. But at that moment in the game, it’s about finding a way to put the dagger in them and that definitely could have been a dagger.”
The broadcast pointed out that it looked like Brown slowed down on the route after getting behind the safety.
“It’s not that I didn’t think the ball was coming,” Brown said. “When I looked up, I didn’t see the ball and when I looked back I didn’t see the ball. And then the ball was thrown. Like I said, we just missed.”
Hurts ended up completing 23 of 38 passes for 280 yards and 2 touchdowns in this game, while Saquon Barkley had just 6 rushing attempts. That may be a tad out of whack but the passing game was actually working early.
With Patrick Surtain II on Brown, that left DeVonta Smith with a 1-on-1 matchup against Riley Moss and he dominated on his way to a 114-yard performance. But after the game, Smith pointed at not being on the same page offensively; he explained there were some missed hand signals at the line of scrimmage
“It’s just the flow of the game,” Smith said. “Within a play, there’s a lot that’s on the guys’ minds. Certain routes adjust to certain things like that. Jalen has a lot on his mind and things like that. He’s trying to work on the protection and things like that.
“There’s times where we’re looking at him and he may give a signal before or after we look. Ultimately, we have to be on the same page. We have to see that signal no matter what.”
The irony from this game is the one thing the Eagles had been able to lean on offensively all season actually didn’t come through in the first half. They entered Sunday perfect in the red zone, converting with touchdowns on all 11 trips. But they stalled after a a 70-yard drive in the first quarter.
Still, the Eagles were moving the football and they did punch in a touchdown on their next trip inside the 20 to take a lead into halftime. And when they scored on that long pass to Barkley early in the third, it looked like they were about to run away with it.
“The game could have went different,” Goedert said. “Offensively, I feel like we let the team down.”
Here’s a recap of the four drives after the Eagles scored that Barkley touchdown:
• 5 plays, 23 net yards, punt
• 3 plays, -16 net yards, punt
• 3 plays, -6 net yards, punt
• 3 plays, 2 net yards, punt
During that stretch when the Eagles’ offense couldn’t stay on the field, the Eagles’ defense surrendered two touchdowns and a field goal to the Broncos. And when the Eagles got the ball back with 1:11 on the clock at the end of the game, they were able to move the ball again, but it was too little, too late.
As they move on to Week 6 of the 2025 season, they have plenty to clean up on a short week.
“It is about us and how we look into our process,” Hurts said. “And we have to truly take that a day at a time so we can make it as difficult or as easy as it needs to be. Ultimately, we just have to have the right mentality going into this week and every week and take [control of] the things that we can control, assess our systems, assess our process, assess all of these things and say, ‘What can we improve on? What’s working?’ Not even what’s working, what’s efficient, what can we improve on, and really evaluate that and grow.
“But I say this again, it’s not a capability thing. We just have to really stay focused on the task at hand, stay focused on the main thing, and be bought into the collective of doing that by any means necessary. So this is a great one to learn from and we will learn from it.”
from NFL News, Scores, Fantasy Games and Highlights 2020 | Yahoo Sports https://ift.tt/J4Ra1ib
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