Eagles at Redskins Winners and Losers

The Eagles lost to the Redskins 27-20, easily their worst loss of the season.

Winners

The Redskins

Jay Gruden seems to have the Eagles’ number.

Neither

Carson Wentz

It’s not saying much, but Wentz was the best player on the Eagles today. He had a highlight worthy scramble and pass to Dorial Green-Beckham in the 3rd that was called back on a penalty that didn’t exist, and his deep pass to Jordan Matthews in the 4th was excellent. And his near catch of his own batted pass was a pretty impressive display of awareness and speed to get to it. In his last few plays he may have held onto the ball too long, but rookies tend to make those kind of mistakes. Wentz didn’t win, but he certainly didn’t lose them the game. The focal point of this season is his development and it’s encouraging that his worst game so far really wasn’t bad.

Losers

The Eagles

They lost and thoroughly deserved it. On defense they were undisciplined, sloppy and just plain got beat. They couldn’t stop a bad Redskins running game, and they made too many mistakes in the passing game. On offense they continuously shot themselves in the foot with penalties and bad blocking. And it wasn’t just the players, neither Doug Pederson nor Jim Schwartz called a good game.

The defense

Yesterday I wrote that we have seen the Eagles operating mostly at their ceiling, and unfortunately today we didn’t see them playing at that level, which was to be expected at some point. The run defense was abysmal against a run offense that normally can’t get anything going. His awful interception aside, Kirk Cousins was able to throw all over the field, fortunately for the Eagles the Redskins dropped some key passes. Connor Barwin and Jordan Hicks were invisible. Even Malcolm Jenkins and Rodney McLeod had bad games.

Halapoulivaati Vaitai

The Eagles coaching staff expressed a lot of confidence in Vaitai taking over for Lane Johnson, and he did absolutely nothing to indicate they should ever have been confident in him. On the first play of the game he got manhandled by Ryan Kerrigan and gave up a sack, and it didn’t get much better after that. The coaches are going to have to seriously consider moving Allen Barbre to right tackle against the Vikings defense next week.

Zach Ertz

Zach Ertz averages six catches a game against the Redskins. He wasn’t thrown to until the 4th quarter. And then he couldn’t catch an easy pass that could have been a touchdown.

Fletcher Cox

His roughing the passer penalty cost the team four points, and then on the next series he started with a careless encroachment penalty. Had the game been 23-20 on what was the Eagles final possession, they might have gotten in to field goal range and had a chance to go to OT.

The Eric Rowe trade

The decision to trade Eric Rowe was a questionable one at the time, and today it looked pretty bad. Jalen Mills struggled with deep routes, and with Leodis McKelvin already out, when Nolan Carroll went down with an injury the Eagles were left with Mills as their only true cornerback on the roster.