We did not really expect this at the end of their 2021 season, when they were thumped, 31-15, by the Buccaneers in the wild-card round, but the Eagles come into Super Bowl LVII having fully earned their place in this game as the NFL’s most complete team on both sides of the ball. General manager Howie Roseman has done an amazing job in filling the roster holes, the coaching staffs have been great in putting all those assets in the right places, and Jalen Hurts has answered the franchise’s most important question by becoming the franchise quarterback everybody hoped he could be.
As effective and as explosive as the Chiefs can be at any given point in time — and the Eagles will have to counter that in all kinds of ways — it’s also true that Philly just has more paths to victory in this game. This doesn’t automatically give the Eagles the second Lombardi Trophy in franchise history, because their opponent has an estimable cadre of skill players, and there are ways in which the Chiefs can pull off what seems like a bit on an upset.
We’ve given Kansas City a punch sheet of things they need to do in order to win Super Bowl LVII.
Here are four things the Eagles will have to do to a greater or lesser degree if they’re to finish their season with the NFL’s greatest prize.
(All advanced metrics courtesy of Pro Football Focus, Sports Info Solutions, and Football Outsiders unless otherwise indicated).
Swarm to the quarterback without blitzing.
There are ways to stop Patrick Mahomes — or at least, limit the damage he can do to your defense — but blitzing is definitely and decidedly NOT one of them. This season, when facing five or more pass-rushers, Mahomes has completed 113 of 171 passes for 1,247 yards, 511 air yards, a league-high 18 touchdowns, just two interceptions, just eight sacks, and a passer rating of 117.8.
This is less of an issue for the Eagles’ defense than it is for others — this season, they’ve put up 65 of their 78 sacks (solo and combined) and 232 of their 318 total pressures with four or fewer rushers. This is just a warning for Eagles defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon in case he wants to get cute.
Blitzing Mahomes is a problem not specifically because he has any desire to demolish your extra pressure with the deep ball. He can do that if you leave it open, as the Bengals did in Week 13 on a Cover-1 blitz in which Mahomes played Spot the Huckleberry with slot cornerback Mike Hilton, and Marquez Valdes-Scantling came out on top…
…it’s more that Mahomes has such faith in the YAC monsters in this offense. This season, both the Texans and the Broncos tried man blitzes against Mahomes that left defensive voids to the flat areas, and Mahomes was perfectly happy to dump the ball to Jerick McKinnon.
It worked for 24 yards against Denver…
…and it worked for 21 yards against Houston.
Gannon knows 100 times more about football than I do, so I know that if I can figure this out, he’s all over it. Against Patrick Mahomes, you pressure without blitzing, and you make him wait for his favorite targets.
Let’s get into that second point.
Limit Travis Kelce with bumps and brackets.
The last time the Eagles’ defense had to deal with Travis Kelce, it was Week 4 of the 2021 season. Philly lost, 42-30, but that was far more about Jonathan Gannon’s defense finding no answers for Tyreek Hill (who went off for 11 catches on 12 targets for 186 yards and three touchdowns) than anything Kelce did. Kansas City’s marquee tight end had four catches on six targets for 23 yards.
The Eagles’ defense is much better overall than it was then, but Kelce is playing at as high a level as he has throughout his NFL career. With Hill gone to the Dolphins in trade, the Chiefs are running far more two- and three-tight end sets, and Kelce is at the center of it all. If Gannon and his players are to contain Kelce, it will have to be by bumping him off the line of scrimmage to upset the timing of the Chiefs’ short and intermediate passing game, and by bracketing him when he gets upfield.
The 49ers’ quarterback situation was an injury-riddled disaster in the NFC Championship game, and the Eagles limited Georgie Kittle — like Kelce, a top tight end who really is the primary receiving threat in that offense — to three catches on four targets for 32 yards. How did they do it, besides knocking every San Francisco quarterback out of the game? By bumping Kittle off the line of scrimmage with linebackers, and bracketing him up top to make those looks tougher for whichever quarterback was left.
With 9:48 left in the first quarter, Brock Purdy completed a nine-yard pass to Kittle, but linebacker Kyzir White limited that play by staying on Kittle one-on-one through the route. This was Cover-1, and linebacker T.J. Edwards was responsible for Christian McCaffrey out of the backfield. The 49ers stretched Philly’s secondary with three receivers running longer routes away from the middle of the field, so this was all on White, and he got it done.
On this 10-yard completion to Brandon Aiyuk with 8:07 left in the first quarter, watch how White and safety Marcus Epps reacted to Kittle’s route. Kittle was trying to cross the seams, which is a good zone-beater against the Eagles’ Cover-3. But White hugged Kittle through the route to slow him down, and Epps was charged with hanging over the top just in case Kittle broke free. You can see cornerback Darius Slay telling Epps to roll deeper pre-snap, and Slay was also taking the middle to muck things up just that much more.
This looked like a fairly pre-determined throw to Aiyuk on the out, but you can also imagine Purdy being told that if he doesn’t like what he sees up the middle, take the easy way every time.
This Purdy sack with 7:03 left in the first quarter was another example of how the Eagles can make things tough for a quarterback by sticking their talons in your Hall of Fame tight end. This time, Kittle tried to run what looked like a skinny post against Cover-3, but he had White handing Kittle to Slay, and all the way up the route, Kittle just couldn’t get free. The result? Purdy tried to hit Aiyuk to the other side, but the pressure was coming. The Eagles are very good at taking away your first read, and depositing you on your butt before you can get to anything else.
Now, can Patrick Mahomes turn those things into scramble drills in which Kelce does have time to get free from the clamps? Sure. Mahomes and Kelce have defined their careers by that to a degree. But the idea is to make them do it more often than they would prefer.
Create chaos out of order.
The Chiefs like to make defenses think too much with a lot of different personnel packages, pre-snap looks, and motions. It’s their philosophy to start off with chaos and ramp it up from there. The Eagles have a far more stoic pre-snap philosophy. They run just about everything out of 11 personnel (one tight end, one running back, three receivers), and they’re not nearly into pre-snap motion as Kansas City is. Head coach Nick Sirianni and offensive coordinator Shane Steichen won’t make you hesitate because you’re wondering what the heck this weird pre-snap thing is. They’ll do it because you know what things look like pre-snap, but that gives you no idea what’s coming.
Greg Cosell of NFL Films and ESPN’s NFL Matchup has mentioned this 17-yard Kenneth Gainwell run in the NFC Championship game as emblematic of the problems the Eagles create out of these 11 personnel looks, and it’s worth reviewing. Gainwell was offset to Jalen Hurts, who’s lined up in the pistol. Hurts had Quez Watkins as the X-iso receiver to the backside, and a bunch right with A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and tight end Dallas Goedert. At the snap, Hurts had the following options: Watkins to the back side, a TE screen to Goedert, and an RPO in which Hurts might be watching linebackers Fred Warner and Dre Greenlaw.
Warner and Greenlaw comprise the NFL’s best linebacker duo, and what were they doing after the snap? Watching and waiting, which gave Gainwell the space he needed to hit it to the left side. Add in the outstanding blocking (to be expected from this amazing offensive line), and what the Eagles did here was to create paralysis by analysis.
If the Eagles can present that same Forrest Gump box of chocolates approach, where you just don’t know what you’re going to get, they could have Kansas City’s defense on the ropes quite a bit. We’ve seen other defenses fall prey to it all season long.
Beware of Kansas City's motion-based run game.
The Chiefs are not regarded as a running team; no Andy Reid-coached team ever will be. But it’s worth mentioning that seventh-round rookie Isiah Pacheco has been a top-seven back in the NFL in the second half of the season and into the playoffs in most categories. I mentioned in my piece on how the Chiefs could win the Super Bowl that there are all kinds of potential advantages to making this more about the run game than anybody would expect, and here’s another:
The Eagles are HORRIBLE against teams that run the ball with pre-snap motion, and the Chiefs are absolutely dominant when they do just that. Kansas City has run the ball 292 times this season with any kind of pre-snap motion for 1,394 yards, 695 yards after contact, 4.8 yards per attempt, an EPA of 12.13 (fifth-best in the league), and an NFL-best 15 touchdowns.
The Eagles have defended 279 runs with motion this season, and they’ve allowed 1,329 yards, 706 yards after contact, 4.8 yards per attempt, an EPA per attempt of 0.05 (fifth-worst in the league), and 13 touchdowns.
Since we’ve talked about how well the Eagles run out of 11 personnel, let’s give the Chiefs a little love here, too. On this 18-yard Pacheco run against the Texans in Week 15, cornerback Tavierre Thomas motioned with JuJu Smith-Schuster away from the run strength, taking safety Jalen Pitre from his two-deep look to more of a force role. That was planned. What was not planned was Pitre’s reaction to the outside run, which was to crash inside, influenced by tight end Noah Gray cracking to the backside.
Banana, meet tailpipe.
The Eagles just faced another offense that loves to run with motion in the 49ers. This 23-yard Christian McCaffrey touchdown with 8:37 left in the first half of the NFC Championship game showed vulnerabilities to similar concepts. Motion out of 11 personnel to force an unwieldy matchup, the tight end (George Kittle) crashing inside to force second-level defenders to that part of the formation, and then… they’re off.
McCaffrey helped his case by jumping over Marcus Epps and faking Darius Slay out of his cleats, but Pacheco — who has forced 23 missed tackles on just 192 carries this season — can do that to a degree as well.
