Divvying Up Blame for the Eagles Horrendous 2020 Season

[jsdarkstar]

https://www.nbcsports.com/philadelphia/eagles/divvying-blame-eagles-horrendous-2020-season

Dave Zangaro Makes some interesting points:
 

It’s not easy to figure out who to blame for the Eagles’ disastrous 2020 season because there’s a lot wrong with the Birds this year.

In any season that goes this wrong, everyone is trying to figure out how the blame should be distributed and it’s really tough to do because so many of these areas overlap.

Is the front office bringing in bad players? Or is the coaching staff failing to develop the players the front office brings in? Or are good players playing poorly? See, it’s not always that simple.

With that said, I took some time and decided to figure out how I’d divvy up blame for the Eagles’ 2020 season.

Here’s what I came up with:

Roster construction: 40%

This team isn’t talented enough and this roster has been mismanaged horribly. I played around with these percentages for a while but the one constant was that roster construction remained at the very top of the list. I give Howie Roseman all the credit in the world for constructing the Super Bowl team, but this 4-10-1 team has his fingerprints all over it.

We need to start with the draft, where Roseman has selected 36 players since being reinstated into power in 2016 and exactly one of them has become a Pro Bowler. That was Carson Wentz in the 2017 season. Roseman has found some pieces to the puzzle. Miles Sanders and Dallas Goedert are the blue-chippers in recent drafts and Isaac Seumalo back in 2016 turned out well eventually. But there have been far too many misses and the lack of young, talented players on this roster is a direct result of poor drafting. There’s just no way around it.

And it has killed the Eagles at certain positions, like receiver and corner, more than others. The Eagles could have had D.K. Metcalf and Justin Jefferson but they ended up with J.J. Arcega-Whiteside and Jalen Reagor. It’s too early to say Reagor is a bust — he still has a chance to be a good player — but will he ever be as good as Jefferson is right now? And we know JJAW will never be as good as Metcalf. But even if Pro Bowlers weren’t selected after them, the Eagles haven’t gotten impact players at receiver. And at corner it’s arguably even worse. The Eagles have drafted four corners in the last few years and the best of the bunch has been Jalen Mills. They failed to get starters in 2017 when they took Sidney Jones and Rasul Douglas in the second and third rounds and Avonte Maddox has proven to be a depth player that the Eagles force-feed into the starting lineup.

We’ll get to injuries soon, but I want to point something out. If the Eagles had a real CB2, then Maddox would be a fine backup. And when injuries hit, you’d have that fine backup in the lineup instead of a UDFA like Michael Jacquet, who is clearly overmatched as a rookie in the NFL. So it’s not like you can absolve roster management because of injuries. Having better top end players almost automatically gives you better depth.

Aside from the draft, when you look back at the 2017 season, the amazing thing Roseman did that year was bring in free agents. All his cheap one- or two-year deals hit, which was incredible but not really sustainable. In recent seasons, that hit rate has dropped off by an insane amount.

And then there’s the allocation of funds. Roseman’s most obvious blunder in recent seasons was guaranteeing Alshon Jeffery’s 2020 contract but that’s not the only mistake he’s made. Despite calling for a youth movement, Roseman continued to bring back aging vets like DeSean Jackson, Jason Peters, Vinny Curry and more. And now the Eagles are in a somewhat ominous salary cap situation going forward.

This really comes full circle back to drafting. If you struggle to draft, you try to fix rosters with Band-Aids and it’s not sustainable as the Eagles are finding out.

Coaching: 25%

I could have divvied this up further into specific coaches, but I didn’t. Mainly we’re talking about Doug Pederson, Jim Schwartz and Dave Fipp in this category. Those are the coaches who control the three major aspects of the team.

We’ll start with Pederson, who has struggled this season. Even if you think he isn’t the main problem, he hasn’t had a good year. There have been countless decisions that I have questioned this year. Playing for a tie, throwing a fade to Hakeem Butler, going for some particular 4th downs and not others, abandoning the run too early despite Miles Sanders’ being the Eagles most explosive weapon. But aside from all those individual decisions that have added up, Pederson is in charge of an offense that has failed to score 30 points once this season. Jeff Lurie really wants his team to be on the forefront offensively and the Eagles are 25th in the NFL in points scored. They’re stagnant and lack innovation offensively. After the Eagles fired Mike Groh and brought in this collaborative offensive approach, it removed a human shield from Pederson and now that the offense is still bad, he deserves a lot of the blame for it.

Defensively, I think Schwartz has — at least for the most part — done an OK job given the players he has. Let’s face it: The Eagles don’t have a ton of talent on the defensive side of the ball. They have Fletcher Cox and Brandon Graham as their Pro Bowlers but they lost Malcolm Jenkins and replaced him with Jalen Mills. And then the linebacker position was completely neglected. But Schwartz deserves blame for his stubbornness at times. He likes his guys and plays them to a fault. Remember it took an injury to finally get Nate Gerry out of the lineup and Alex Singleton in there. And there are more examples of that too, of Schwartz not understanding how to best use his players.

 

And then on special teams, it’s hard to pinpoint if Fipp is really the main culprit. After all, when there are injuries to a team, they all trickle down to special teams. But it’s also clear that the Eagles no longer have one of the best special teams groups in the NFL like they did earlier during his seven-year tenure with the team. They have really fallen off.

Injuries: 17%

Pederson on Monday was quick to point out injuries as a reason for the Eagles’ regression over the last three years. While that seemed somewhat self-serving, it doesn’t mean he’s necessarily wrong.

Now, you can certainly say the front office is responsible for bringing in older players who get hurt more frequently and you can even blame the front office for putting these doctors and trainers in place. But some of this just comes down to bad luck too.

Think about the Eagles’ offensive line this season. The only guy who hasn’t ended up on IR this season is Jason Kelce. They’ve literally suffered injuries at every other position on the line. And then on top of it, they lost games with Miles Sanders, Dallas Goedert, Zach Ertz, DeSean Jackson, Jalen Reagor and more on offense. And defensively, they’ve been decimated in the secondary and have also lost some players in the first two levels too.

For whatever reason, the Eagles seem to get injured at a higher rate than other teams. While there are many factors that go into that, it’s impossible to ignore the impact that had on the 2020 season. But it would be a little too much Fool’s Gold to think once this team is healthy it’s a playoff contender again. That’s why injuries are at just 17 percent.

Poor QB play: 15%

I have a feeling this will be the most polarizing topic of this whole thing and it wasn’t easy to figure out where to put the play of Wentz. While he was blamed for a lot this season, it’s unfair to say he was their biggest problem. But it is fair to say that a franchise quarterback should be able to help a team overcome other problem areas. That’s what Wentz was able to do in the last quarter of the 2019 season but failed to do in the first 12 games of 2020.

There are a lot of factors that led to Wentz’s poor play. The OL was decimated by injuries, Pederson didn’t seem to have a great idea of how to call games for him and Roseman didn’t surround him with enough talent. But none of that absolves Wentz from his own poor play. Instead of covering up for other problems, Wentz became a problem of his own.

In 12 games this year, Wentz really was bad. Aside from constant pressure and his targets struggling to help him, the franchise quarterback missed easy throws, had terrible pocket awareness and made egregiously awful decisions. He threw 15 interceptions in 12 games. That just can’t happen.

Poor play: 3%

This last little chunk, I chalk up to life in the NFL. In here, we’re talking about non-quarterback players who are talented, who were put in good positions and failed to make plays. This really hammers home the point that the Eagles simply haven’t had a very talented or healthy roster in 2020.

The most consistent culprit in this category would probably be Zach Ertz this season. He’s a guy with high expectations who hasn’t played well, even aside from his injury.

But there are a few other examples here. Like when Jason Kelce had a rash of bad snaps or Sanders dropped passes or McLeod took a poor angle to a tackle or Darius Slay got bested by some of the NFL’s top wideouts.  Those things happen, but they happen to every team in the NFL. There are no perfect players. The bigger issue is that the Eagles don’t seem to have the right players in place.

 

[Fresh_Prince]

I hate the phrase "divvying up"

It's like it's too hard for some people to say "dividing"

[jsdarkstar]

1 minute ago, Fresh_Prince said:

I hate the phrase "divvying up"

It's like it's too hard for some people to say "dividing"

I guess you can't handle the Gerund. LOL.

[wyote]

I want to punch this guy in the mouth. The disrespect he has for the guys who were lost to injury is infuriating. I hope he gets run over by the team bus. 

[jsdarkstar]

26 minutes ago, wyote said:

I want to punch this guy in the mouth. The disrespect he has for the guys who were lost to injury is infuriating. I hope he gets run over by the team bus. 

For me injuries should be given a much higher percentage for the blame. 

[wyote]

9 minutes ago, jsdarkstar said:

For me injuries should be given a much higher percentage for the blame. 

Give us Brooks and Johnson and we win week 1, period. Everything changes from there. 

 

[time2rock]

12 hours ago, wyote said:

Give us Brooks and Johnson and we win week 1, period. Everything changes from there. 

 

5-9-1 instead of 4-10-1? 

In all seriousness, I voted "all of the above" but agree that injuries should have been given a higher percentage.  I suppose though that some of the injury issues are part of poor roster construction (the decision to bring back JP who was clearly shot when last season concluded ... he is an injury waiting to happen, so shouldn't be any surprise that he suffered injuries ... yet ... again).  Howie is too reliant on aging vets (mainly due to the lack of young talent but that dead horse has been beaten ad nauseam) who obviously will be much more susceptible to injury.  

 

[wyote]

58 minutes ago, time2rock said:

5-9-1 instead of 4-10-1? 

In all seriousness, I voted "all of the above" but agree that injuries should have been given a higher percentage.  I suppose though that some of the injury issues are part of poor roster construction (the decision to bring back JP who was clearly shot when last season concluded ... he is an injury waiting to happen, so shouldn't be any surprise that he suffered injuries ... yet ... again).  Howie is too reliant on aging vets (mainly due to the lack of young talent but that dead horse has been beaten ad nauseam) who obviously will be much more susceptible to injury.  

I didn't get the sense that they were eager to bring back JP, nor that his injury was particularly devastating to the team. Even Dillard was probably a bigger loss. 

After Brooks's injury, though, not bringing in JP -- unless someone better was available at that point -- would've signaled that the management was for tanking this year. 

 

 

[jsdarkstar]

2 hours ago, time2rock said:

5-9-1 instead of 4-10-1? 

In all seriousness, I voted "all of the above" but agree that injuries should have been given a higher percentage.  I suppose though that some of the injury issues are part of poor roster construction (the decision to bring back JP who was clearly shot when last season concluded ... he is an injury waiting to happen, so shouldn't be any surprise that he suffered injuries ... yet ... again).  Howie is too reliant on aging vets (mainly due to the lack of young talent but that dead horse has been beaten ad nauseam) who obviously will be much more susceptible to injury.  

 

Yeah, some of the reasons blend with other reasons, like injuries and roster construction. 

[wyote]

My guess is that they knew they were playing with fire, but they had a lot of pretty good old vets and they took a chance that they could squeeze one more year out of them and get just enough out of the young guys to make a run. It was a gamble and they lost. 

Five months ago I thought we all knew that this was the gamble. I thought we all know that it was going badly when the injuries started piling up. Once everyone was hurt, I would've thought we all knew that our only chance to win very many games was if Wentz could play hero ball successfully. But now we've got a lot of princesses stomping their feet and weeping up storms about how they weren't given what they were promised, and it's everyone's fault. 

[jsdarkstar]

2 hours ago, wyote said:

My guess is that they knew they were playing with fire, but they had a lot of pretty good old vets and they took a chance that they could squeeze one more year out of them and get just enough out of the young guys to make a run. It was a gamble and they lost. 

Five months ago I thought we all knew that this was the gamble. I thought we all know that it was going badly when the injuries started piling up. Once everyone was hurt, I would've thought we all knew that our only chance to win very many games was if Wentz could play hero ball successfully. But now we've got a lot of princesses stomping their feet and weeping up storms about how they weren't given what they were promised, and it's everyone's fault. 

Howie failed to address the O Line in the offseason. I have to wonder if this was part of the plan in the year of Covid to tank the season for better draft picks. 

[greend]

19 hours ago, wyote said:

Give us Brooks and Johnson and we win week 1, period. Everything changes from there. 

 

This is a very good point

[jsdarkstar]

it appears as if Brooks has been Activated. 

[weko]

4 hours ago, jsdarkstar said:

it appears as if Brooks has been Activated. 

Only reason to play him is to showcase his recovery in hopes of getting a 4th rounder for him

[jsdarkstar]

1 hour ago, weko said:

Only reason to play him is to showcase his recovery in hopes of getting a 4th rounder for him

Yeah, I doubt he's gonna play. Achilles is a long process of recovery. It will be enough to see him running around. Get an early start for OTA's. 

 

[time2rock]

6 hours ago, jsdarkstar said:

Howie failed to address the O Line in the offseason.

They spent draft picks on Driscoll and Wanogho.  

[EagleJoe8]

On 12/29/2020 at 6:19 PM, wyote said:

I want to punch this guy in the mouth. The disrespect he has for the guys who were lost to injury is infuriating. I hope he gets run over by the team bus. 

This sounds like a temper tantrum to me. 

[20dawk4life]

Need to be able to select multiple options 

[jsdarkstar]

40 minutes ago, 20dawk4life said:

Need to be able to select multiple options 

Yep. Surprised no one has picked Wentz given all of the hatred coming his way. Maybe should have posted this in TATE to get a bigger response. LOL. 

[20dawk4life]

Just now, jsdarkstar said:

Yep. Surprised no one has picked Wentz given all of the hatred coming his way. Maybe should have posted this in TATE to get a bigger response. LOL. 

8 people went with all the above so they kind of picked wentz. 

[jsdarkstar]

Just now, 20dawk4life said:

8 people went with all the above so they kind of picked wentz. 

Yeah, kind of like the article, assigning a percentage to each. It takes a village. Not Just Wentz. Though on the radio it's all him. He can't be fixed etc. 

[mr_irie1]

I picked all of the above but wish I could subtract Lurie. I don't really think he has much to do with anything that went bad this year. 

[UK_EaglesFan89]

It isn't any one persons fault. It's been a collective failure. 

The biggest culprit is Howie for building his roster. Far too many bad draft picks and too many bad decisions. 

On the field Carson has been the biggest issue in my mind. He's been a bottom 2/3 in the league QB.

But that doesn't absolve the coaches of blame either. Doug hasn't called good games and he hasn't had enough balance with the run. The offense also has continued to look ill disciplined and unprepared. And the defense has been very up and down all year. It's put in some impressive games and drives within games but it seems to let up right when they are needed most. 

And so ultimately if the next year goes as badly, or potentially worse, then Lurie has to be the one to blame. He's decided to run it back with Doug and very likely Howie. 

[jsdarkstar]

8 hours ago, UK_EaglesFan89 said:

It isn't any one persons fault. It's been a collective failure. 

The biggest culprit is Howie for building his roster. Far too many bad draft picks and too many bad decisions. 

On the field Carson has been the biggest issue in my mind. He's been a bottom 2/3 in the league QB.

But that doesn't absolve the coaches of blame either. Doug hasn't called good games and he hasn't had enough balance with the run. The offense also has continued to look ill disciplined and unprepared. And the defense has been very up and down all year. It's put in some impressive games and drives within games but it seems to let up right when they are needed most. 

And so ultimately if the next year goes as badly, or potentially worse, then Lurie has to be the one to blame. He's decided to run it back with Doug and very likely Howie. 

I agree it's a collective failure. I believe Carson can turn it around once he has an improved O Line and WR's that can get open. I believe that having over 13 different line combos this season plays a large part in the problems with Wentz. 

[UK_EaglesFan89]

31 minutes ago, jsdarkstar said:

I agree it's a collective failure. I believe Carson can turn it around once he has an improved O Line and WR's that can get open. I believe that having over 13 different line combos this season plays a large part in the problems with Wentz. 

Its definitely a collective failure without doubt. No one single person can be responsible for the ish show we've witnessed. I don't agree that Carson can be turned around but hey we shall see.