The defending NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles currently rank 27th in Defensive DVOA after finishing third last season, which isn’t good enough for anybody in the building. So, the team made the decision in mid-December to replace first-year defensive coordinator Sean Desai as a play-caller with senior assistant Matt Patricia, whose experience with the New England Patriots under Bill Belichick from 2004 through 2017 held some weight.
Or, the Eagles were just throwing stuff against the wall to see what would stick. At this point, either explanation is equally plausible.
Not that things have gone any better with Patricia at the helm. The Eagles were profoundly embarrassed last Sunday by the Arizona Cardinals in a 35-31 loss that saw their defense allow 221 rushing yards, 5.5 yards per attempt, 130 yards after contact, 14 first downs, and a league-worst (for Week 17) 0.18 EPA per attempt on 40 carries. That this all happened to a team that counts former Philly defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon as its head coach put some extra sting on it.
“I do believe,” head coach Nick Sirianni said post-game after the run defense debacle. “I still believe in the guys in that locker room, the players. I still believe in the coaches. I think we’ve got the guys in this place to get turned in the right direction. We don’t have much time, obviously, right. We’ve got one more game before playoffs starts, and we’ve got to do everything we can do to get back on track this upcoming week.
“I think there’s been spurts, obviously, the last couple games where we played good ball on defense. Tonight wasn’t one of those times.”
As Sirianni said, there isn’t much time before the postseason begins, and if this is the state of the Eagles’ defense, they’ll be lucky if they aren’t pushed around from start to finish — and it could be a very early finish.
In this week’s “Xs and Os with Greg Cosell and Doug Farrar,” the guys got into the reasons for these issues from a formerly great defense.
"If you're struggling in the run game, it's because #eagles D-line is not controlling the point of attack and they're getting moved."@gregcosell and @NFL_DougFarrar discuss it here on "Xs and Os"
🎧 Listen NOW on https://t.co/w8aJ3oEtSC
🎧 Listen NOW on https://t.co/m0YatIypc5 pic.twitter.com/lgLnaU9EpZ— For The Win (@ForTheWin) January 5, 2024
You can watch this week’s “Xs and Os” right here:
You can also listen and subscribe to the “Xs and Os” podcast on Spotify…
…and on Apple Podcasts.
Now, let’s investigate why Philly’s defense has fallen apart this season.
Matt Patricia is still trying to figure it out.
One primary thing the Eagles are doing differently under Patricia is playing with six defensive backs… a LOT more often.
In Weeks 1-14, the Eagles played dime on 42 opponent passing attempts. In the three games under Patricia, they’ve played dime on 41 opponent passing attempts, and that part’s actually gone pretty well. In dime coverage since Week 15, the Eagles have allowed 20 receptions on those 41 attempts for 216 yards, two touchdowns, one interception, and an opponent passer rating of 70.8 — 12th best in the league. They’ve played two-high coverage on 63% of their coverage snaps, and they rank 12th in Defensive Success Rate. That’s a good thing, because when the Eagles have played one-high under Patricia, they’ve had the worst Defensive Success Rate in the NFL.
Dime coverage has allowed Patricia to do two things: Take one of his linebackers off the field (their linebackers have been liabilities all season long), and get more interesting with his disguise and late movement. One play that did go well for Philly’s defense against the Cardinals was this five-yard scramble on third-and-12 with 2:00 left in the first half. Murray wasn’t entirely sure whether he was getting single-high or not (it was Cover-1), the pass rush hurried his process, and the Eagles won that round.
The Eagles have played a TON more dime under Patricia, and it does allow different (and at times actually effective) coverage looks. pic.twitter.com/AbQqPu7Le9
— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) January 5, 2024
“It’s not uncommon during the season for things to shift or change from what you’re seeing from opponents,” Patricia said. “It’s interesting — sometimes you see them in blocks, you might see a similar offense four weeks in a row or three weeks in a row, and then go to an offense that’s maybe a little different than what you’ve seen and now here are some different ideas or thoughts that come at you defensively from a different way or something different from a scheme standpoint that you have to adjust to and get fixed.
“From that aspect, I think it’s always been that collaborative group effort with all of it, and certainly the run is the biggest focus this week that we’ve got to get fixed and handled, sure.”
Patricia will use the Belichick template of designing his defenses for a specific opponent, but as Casey Stengel once said,” They say it can’t be done, but it don’t always work.”
If you’ve watched the Eagles’ defense this season, you’ll understand what that means.
The Eagles are dropping their pass-rushers to less than optimal effect.
One thing that has not worked as well for the Eagles under Patricia? Dropping his pass-rushers in coverage. This was a Murray completion to tight end Trey McBride with Haason Reddick dropping into curl-flat coverage in Philly’s Cover-3. Reddick is a great pass-rusher, and he does have a history of playing off-ball… but I think the Eagles fooled themselves on this one.
Putting Hasson Reddick (your best pass-rusher) in coverage for 10 snaps against the Cardinals was… certainly a choice. pic.twitter.com/NYyI9ak3jS
— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) January 2, 2024
This Murray scramble with 7:25 left in the first quarter worked more favorably, because the dropping edge-rusher in question (Brandon Graham) defended running back James Conner’s choice route well enough to disrupt the play. Choice was probably the read here, but Graham and linebacker Nick Morrow combined to clamp down. Here, Patricia isn’t asking his edge guys to cover as much ground.
give matty p credit; dropping an edge-rusher into coverage actually worked here pic.twitter.com/uCvhNVEAyS
— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) January 5, 2024
“I think they [the Cardinals’ offense] did a good job in some of those, and I’ll come back to that and kind of got us in some situations,” Patricia said about the drops. “I’m always conscious of making sure that I get our guys that can rush to rush as much as we can. And sometimes the game dictates or the personnel packages dictate a little differently in those situations. Sometimes the hash can dictate a little bit on that, too, where the ball is lined up.
“I think that’s where I can do a better job of understanding that maybe we got caught in a spring of plays and sometimes that happens if you’re playing a really long series, sometimes it’s easier to correct that stuff, if it’s a quicker series, you come to the sideline and you’re looking at it like hey we need to do more of this. You get caught in a long series, sometimes that becomes a little bit more difficult.
“So, I have to do a better job in that situation of saying, okay, I got stuck in this or we got stuck in this, let me change it and let me get, you know, certainly a guy like Haason in the mix where I think he can help us.”
Especially when your 12 third-down sacks on the season is tied with several other teams for second-worst in the NFL behind only the Cardinals, who have 11. Last season, the Eagles had 34 third-down sacks, by far the league’s best — the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Chargers tied for second-best with 24.
Light boxes are a problem. Stacked boxes are also a problem.
Speaking of the Chargers, and getting your butt handed to you in the run game because you’re playing light boxes a lot (hello, Brandon Staley…), the Eagles have been getting gashed this way, and that was especially true against the Cardinals. Drew Petzing, Arizona’s first-year underrated offensive coordinator (no really, he’s doing some really cool stuff), comes from the Kevin Stafanski tree, so it should not surprise you that the Cardinals have run 12 personnel 21% of the time, and 13 personnel 11% of the time, and that 13 personnel rate is first in the NFL.
The Eagles had light boxes on defense on 61% of their snaps under Sean Desai, and they’ve had light boxes on defense on 61% of their snaps under Patricia. Their light box success rate was 42% under Desai, and it’s 45% under Patricia, so maybe that’s just who they are. Against the Cardinals, the Eagles had six or fewer defenders in the box on 20 of Arizona’s rushing attempts, and they allowed 107 yards, 55 yards after contact, six first downs, and an EPA per attempt of 0.10.
Coaches will tell you what they think of their personnel, and the personnel of the team they’re facing, by what they do on the field. You can throw most of the quotes away and just look at the tape. What I found striking in this game was how often the Cardinals were successfully sending one and two offensive linemen to the second and third levels with no issue. I tend to think that Petzing took a good, hard look at the Eagles’ fronts, and said to himself, “I don’t need to keep all my guys in; I can get creative here.”
On this 22-yard James Conner run with 5:55 left in the third quarter, the Cardinals were in 13 personnel (three tight ends, one receiver, one back) against Philly’s defense which had everybody but deep safety Kevin Byard reading run (and Byard caught on pretty quickly), so this should have worked in the Eagles’ favor. But center Hjalte Froholdt jumped to the second level right away, Philly had about 763 missed tackles by my rough estimate, and even though the entire Eagles defense was cheating to the run side, it was no bueno on that side of the ball.
probably not good when everybody on the eagles' defense going back to chuck bednarik is cheating to the run side, and you miss a bazillion tackles on the way to a 22-yard gain
also, watch hjalte froholdt scoot! pic.twitter.com/5OmUVGgQMC
— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) January 5, 2024
“They had some really good, different run plays that we see, right,” Patricia said of Petzing’s run concepts. “There’s zone runs, which are usually base man blocks or combination blocks that usually move in a particular direction; and then scheme or gap runs or divide-the-defense-type of plays, plays where they can try to put a hard-edge divide into it. And then you’re pulling backside defenders into the front side to try to fit as they are bringing extra people over to the side of the play. And those are always the hardest, those scheme run fits in how you are handling the different pullers and things like that, which we saw. And they did a really good job, and they did it both closed and open, which is something they did.
“And then they built the formation so it may look like a closed formation, so you’re thinking this type of run and then they built it a certain way and gave it a window dressing, and it became an open-side run, with still the scheme, divide-the-defense-type of fit into it.
“That’s where as a coach, my job is I have to make sure that we are seeing the play correctly in the eyes and everything is in the right direction first and foremost. So that’s why I’ve got to do a better job of that to allow those guys to play fast and fit those aggressively like we want them to.”
Well, after the Cardinals debacle, that goes without saying.
Matt Patricia isn't an idiot; there's only so much he can do.
Patricia deservedly became a full-time meme during his time as the Detroit Lions’ head coach from 2018 through 2020. and nobody will ever mistake him for Buddy Ryan, but he’s a passable defensive mind who can roll with personnel that suits his schematic preferences. This Eagles defense has not performed to a level that would ideally fit anybody’s schematic preferences; there’s no Baltimore Ravens or Cleveland Browns situation here where Mike Macdonald or Jim Schwartz can come in and make the most of a bunch of young, undersold, and massively gifted players. Patricia is not playing with house money; his hand includes a number of declining older players, several injury issues, young guys who just don’t get it quite yet, and no absolute week-to-week alpha dogs who can go right ahead and define your defense for you.
“Probably the biggest adjustment I had in pro football 20 years ago when I came into it was that the game day roster is only what it is,” Patricia concluded this week. “It’s only so large. You have to have guys that can cover other responsibilities and that game day roster is going to change week-in, week-out, based on what you need and based on injuries and things like that.
“We always try to maximize everybody’s ability and what they can do and the roles that they can play, and we just take it week-by-week, and so just focus that on this week and see where we are at and as we go forward, we’ll see where the rest of everybody else is as they come back as we get ready to go forward.”
