No QB, no running game, no chance for Eagles without Jalen Hurts and a real O-line
There's no scheming their way out of this mess for the Eagles.
The man with the world’s worst job squinted into a row of camera lights and said that everything is on the table. It was the only thing Nick Sirianni could say. His job is to come up with answers. Except, right now, there aren’t any. Digging ditches is hard work. But it’s not the sort of thing that will drive a man mad.
Sometimes, things really are as bad as they look. The current moment is one of those times for the Eagles. They have no quarterback, and they have no running game, and it is difficult to see how either one of those things is going to change in time to save their season. As bad as they looked in their 25-14 loss to the Panthers, the Eagles’ immediate future looks even worse. Sirianni doesn’t have the luxury of acknowledging that reality. His only hope is that the rest of us will come to understand it.
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This was a good day for Jalen Hurts, and a bad day for everybody else. For Sirianni, who has now lost four straight games for the first time in his six seasons as head coach, not to mention nine of 14 games overall. For Sean Mannion, the first-time play-caller whose offense has failed to reach 250 total yards in four straight games, the first time that has happened to the Eagles since 1999. Even for Vic Fangio, whose defense suffered a number of lapses that are becoming less and less uncharacteristic.
They say that when the tide goes out, you find out who was swimming naked. But, sometimes, the tide comes in so fast that nobody can swim at all. There is a stage of drowning where you become your own worst enemy as well as a danger to those around you. It is not a coincidence that everything seems to be going wrong at the same time. That is how things tend to look when everybody is trying to compensate for fundamentals that do not exist.
The unfortunate truth is as simple as the formula that the Eagles are built upon. The truth is the formula is no longer viable. Combine a great offensive line with a high baseline of competence at the quarterback position and you can win a lot of games in the NFL. Everything that these Eagles do, everything they have done, all that they have accomplished, all of it derives from those two constants. Except, they are not constants to most of the rest of the NFL. The Eagles are seeing life as the 99% sees it. There are no solutions.
“We’re going to have to do different things to help the offense get going,” Sirianni said. “We’re never going to make an excuse on anything. We have to do different things to get them going and score more points, plain and simple, especially there in that second half. So, everything’s on the table. To do the same thing over and over again and not get the results, that’d be foolish. Everything’s on the table of what we need to do to be able to put points on the board.”
Sirianni is correct. He would be foolish not to try something different. Least of all for his survival as head coach.
Yet, Sirianni knows football well enough to know how good he and the rest of the Eagles have had it. He knows there are limits to the impact one man’s changes can make.
The reality of the NFL is this:
You cannot scheme away the in-season retirement of one of the greatest right tackles to ever play the game. You especially cannot do it when his replacement is a developmental rookie third-rounder. The Eagles saw that on the first place of Sunday’s game, when the Panthers blitzed the “B” gap and sacked quarterback Tanner McKee for a loss of 11 yards.
You cannot scheme away the fact that your center and left guard have combined for seven career NFL starts. You especially cannot do it when their predecessors had spent years playing together at a Pro Bowl level.
» READ MORE: Don’t let Howie Roseman escape his share of the blame for this long, hard Eagles season
But the greatest truth of them all is that you cannot scheme away the absence of a quarterback who has the ability to play the position at a functional level. There are maybe 20 people on the planet who possess such an ability. There are certainly fewer than 32. Hurts’ membership in the first group is something that went criminally underrated by anybody who entered this season suggesting that the quarterback was going to need to “earn” his next contract. I suppose he earned it against the Panthers. As frustrated and concerned as Hurts likely is and will be with the blood clot that landed him on injured reserve, he will at least get a chance to watch everyone else watching what life looks like north of the wall.
“My team needs me to be better,” McKee said. “I need to be better. I am so much better, and I’m looking forward to learning everything and becoming the player that I know I am, the player that I can prove that I am. A lot of things obviously that were frustrating fall on me. A lot of things we’ve got to get fixed as an offense for sure.”
The question nobody asks themselves when they ask whether the Eagles should “move on” from Hurts is who they should “move on” to. On a day where Daniel Jones and Geno Smith and Jameis Winston and Kirk Cousins and Jacoby Brissett all started games, the Eagles saw why.
McKee began the season as the third-stringer and one of three backups on the Eagles roster. He did nothing better or worse than look the part. He completed 26-of-45 passes for 215 yards, the bulk of them coming as the Eagles were attempting to rally from a 19-7 deficit in the fourth quarter. He mostly stuck to the sidelines, an understandable strategy given the disaster he courted when he dipped his toe into the middle of the field.
» READ MORE: Tanner McKee says Eagles ‘need me to be better’ after his first start filling in for Jalen Hurts
Granted, he was as much a victim of the Eagles’ other deficiencies as everyone else in the operation. But that’s partly the point. The life the Eagles are living is a lot closer to the one the rest of the NFL regularly lives than the one they enjoyed between 2022 and 2024. Most quarterbacks can’t handle it.
“All of us have a lot of improving to do,” Sirianni said. “I thought Tanner battled. I thought he took care of the football. I thought he put some good balls out there … but everyone’s going to have plays that were good and everyone’s going to have plays that they want back, and that’s coaches too. We’ll look at the tape, but I thought Tanner battled.”
They will look at the tape. They will look at themselves. The great thing about football, about sports, is the illusion of control. On Sunday afternoon, Jordan Mailata was standing in the middle of the Eagles locker room, still in full uniform, talking about all the things people talk about when they don’t know where else to turn. He was talking about abstractions like “want to” and “focus,” the kinds of things people talk about when they know that solutions don’t exist anywhere else.
“Maybe I need to meditate,” he said.
If so, at least it will be a mindful quagmire.
