Eagles defense deserves better than they're getting this year

Eagles defense deserves better than they're getting this year originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia

Jalyx Hunt had one of the best games of his young career on Monday night. The second-year edge rusher had 2 1/2 sacks, 8 tackles, 3 QB hits, a forced fumble and 6 pressures.

And he couldn’t even celebrate.

“It might look good stats-wise but a loss is a loss,” Hunt said after the Eagles fell 22-19 to the Chargers in overtime. “I’m going to have to get on this plane with the dawgs and it’s going to hurt. It’s a long flight. 

“It’s cool, I guess. It’s cool for your mom to talk about, your dad to talk about. They be proud of you and whatnot. But, me personally, I don’t take any [consolations], nothing like that. It don’t feel good. It wasn’t enough, at the end of the day.”

Hunt is right: It wasn’t enough. But it should have been.

The Eagles’ defense on Monday night gave up a touchdown on the Chargers’ very first drive of the game but then tightened up. They allowed just five field goals on the Chargers’ final 12 possessions and gave up an average of just 16.25 yards per drive. They sacked Justin Herbert seven times and pressured him on 68.3% of his dropbacks, the highest single-game pressure rate of any team this season.

It was a great performance and it was wasted.

This Vic Fangio defense deserves better than this.

For what it’s worth — and it’s worth a lot — the players on defense have the right attitude about all this. There can sometimes be a fear, when one side of the ball is carrying the other, that it creates a divide in the locker room. Finger-pointing can happen. But it doesn’t seem like that’s happening here and when asked about that possibility earlier in the season, head coach Nick Sirianni praised the connection portion of his program.

“Just play our ball, stick to what we do and get better,” Zack Baun said on Wednesday. “We haven’t been playing our best either. We can only control what we can control and try our best to play complementary ball from doing what we gotta do.”

Even after a great individual performance, Hunt talked about looking in the mirror too.

“We made some mistakes on the defensive end that we need to clean up,” Hunt said. “We got to go in, [Brandon Graham] taught me how to attack the losses. We gotta get back in and make up for our mistakes. They scored, I don’t know, more than we scored. That hurts. The score hurts, all the field goals hurt. We gotta stop them a little bit more. We gotta go in and fix that.”

But you would think it would be human nature for some of the Eagles’ defensive players to look around and wonder: What the heck do we have to do?

“This is the ultimate team game,” Sirianni said on Wednesday, “and one phase has to pick up another and there could be games like that. There can be games the opposite way, but that’s the important part of always connecting with everybody in the building, controlling the things you can control, all those different things.”

The Eagles have the highest-paid offense in the NFL and through 14 weeks, they rank 19th in points and 24th in yards. And since the bye week, the Eagles have actually regressed.

In their five games since the Week 9 bye, the Eagles’ offense has scored just 8 total touchdowns. The only team in that span to score fewer touchdowns in five games is the Las Vegas Raiders, who fired offensive coordinator Chip Kelly last month.

The Eagles have had 59 total possessions in the last five games and have scored just 8 touchdowns for a paltry percentage of 13.6%. Even if you take away some end-of-half and end-of-game situations, the Eagles’ offense is still woefully underperforming.

On the flip side, the Eagles defense has given up just 9 touchdowns since the bye. Just one team (the Vikings with 7) have given up fewer in five games.

None of this excuses the way the Eagles played on defense against the Bears, giving up 281 rushing yards on the ground. That was a historically bad performance against the run. But, for the most part, the Eagles’ defense has been excellent, giving up just 17.2 points per game since the bye week.

If the Eagles (8-5) are going to make a run this year, it seems like their best hope is that the defense can carry the team as the offense hopefully crawls its way toward league average.

“We got this long flight we gotta get on,” Hunt said. “That sucks after a loss like this. Gotta restart. We got the Raiders coming up this weekend. We gotta look at them on film and just keep building.”

from https://ift.tt/byZBcOU