Hey guys this is a column that me and Wild_eagle are putting together and we will be posting hopefully once a week.  The basic premise of this is to take plays from the Eagles and break them down.  What the Eagles did and what the other team did and how we exploited it.

Picking a first play for this was fairly hard, I didn’t want to pick one of the obvious ones from this year.  Like the plays from the Giants game.  After a long and stressful  process I decided I would pick one of my favorite plays in recent years.

McNabb to Jeremy Maclin 27-yard catch (via coreilly796)

This is a play Im sure you remember.  In a rather frustrating game that we should have put away early this play helped us get in Field goal range to put the game away for good. 

Alright let’s get to breaking this play down.  Before the ball is snapped the defense is showing blitz and its pretty obvious.    When the ball is snapped Denver sends their 3 dl and then 2 extra blitzers.  Our line does a good job of picking up the blitz.  McCoy makes a good block that saves Mcnabb.  Winston Justice gets beat by his man, who stutter steps and then runs right by Winston untouched.  If McNabb had waited just a second longer he would have been brought down.   Both safeties are going to drop back into coverage. 

Now to look at what the offense did.  Desean is out to the right with Celek on the right side of the line.  Maclin and Avant are to the left.  Desean is going to run a drag route, run five yards and cut across the field in front of McNabb.  Celek is going to run 5 yards and then slant out towards the sideline.  As he does this one of the Safeties pushes him (I think this is Dawk but I cant tell for sure) as they slant out the cut off the DB that was supposed to be covering Desean.   The other safety does a good job of picking up the coverage, but in doing so is giving up help over the top.  Deseans CB does a good job of getting back into the play but does so to late. 

Maclin runs a route where he goes twenty yards and cuts to the side line.  Avant runs a similar route however his is shoter by maybe ten yards.  While they are running Maclin is to the outside of his CB and when he cuts to the sideline the DB cant get in front of the pass.  Judging from his position as Maclin is laid out he had gotten ahead of Maclin thinking that it was a streak.  So Maclin cuts and the CB is out of position as I said earlier.   Avant was really very well covered the entire time.  In fact none of the Receivers was open.  This is really a fantastic throw and decision by McNabb and a fantastic catch by Maclin. 

Any tip or suggestions are more than welcome.   I want to do these all offseason, and it would help to perfect it.  So if you think you know of a way to make it better go ahead and let me know.  I realize this was a little short but eh They should start fleshing out soon.  That concludes the first installment to Illegal Forward Pass.  Thank you, come again.