A big reason why Chip Kelly was brought to Philadelphia was because of his success at Oregon. More specifically, his prowess on the offensive side of the ball. It's only natural that the Eagles' lackluster offensive performance against the Cowboys was a huge disappointment for the Eagles head coach.
We didn't play well. I should say that again, we didn't play well at all offensively. Didn't do anything to help us out.
The Eagles only put up 278 yards of total offense. They did so in 75 plays, averaging 3.7 yards per play. They were 4/18 on third down. 14 drives only resulted in a total of 3 points. Horrible.
One can see that Kelly's frustrations are more than reasonable. Putting up 3 points is simply unacceptable, especially by Kelly's standards. Prior to Sunday's game, Kelly had never coached a game where his team had not scored at least one offensive touchdown. Plus, it's not even like Dallas heralds a top defense. Rank wise, they were positioned in the bottom third of the league.
Largely responsible for the offense's lacking performance was the play of second year quarterback Nick Foles. Foles threw for a mere 80 yards on 29 attempts. Kelly spoke on his performance.
[Foles] was off. I guess that's what I would say. At times we had guys open and we didn't put the ball on [them]. But there were other times where we didn't help him either.
Kelly wouldn't put all the blame on Foles. He stated his disappointment in the Eagles offense as a whole a number of times.
I think it's everybody on the offensive side of the ball [to blame]. I don't think we blocked very well, I don't think we caught the ball very well. I don't think we got off routes very well. It was 11 guys on offense. It was all of us on offense, me calling plays, everybody. It's not just one guy.
On the other side of the ball, Chip Kelly was pleased by the performance of the defense. Entering Sunday's game, Dallas has been averaging near 31 points a game. That the Eagles, with a defense that has been playing poorly on the offense, held them to 17 points is an accomplishment.
I thought our defense did an outstanding job all day.
I think we're really excited how our defense is playing. I just think overall through the course of the game, I thought they played with great effort. I thought they did a really good job against an explosive passing operation. Dez Bryant was out there and Jason Witten, Tony Romo is one of the top quarterbacks in this league. So I think our defense gave us some optimism at that point in time. Could they get a stop and they did. And DeMeco Ryans got us a huge play there in the second half, but we've got to capitalize on that [...] Get the ball down to us in the red zone, and we need to come away with 7 and make it a different football game.
Who would have thought the Eagles offense, which had been playing well, would have been the cause of their demise on Sunday, and not the defense, who had not been playing well?