Eagles news: Carson Wentz goes hunting and serves crow

For North Dakota deer, the worst week of the year is Carson Wentz's bye week - Daily News

In case anybody needed a reminder of what the food chain looks like, here it is in pictorial form. Never forget: Carson Wentz is the arbiter of life and death.

CBS analyst Bart Scott: I was wrong about Carson Wentz being 'fool's gold' - Philly.com

So was Scott wrong to call Wentz’s fool’s gold?

“I would take that back,” Scott said when asked about his comment by Damon Amendolara during an appearance on The DA Show on Wednesday night. “I’m man enough to say when I’m wrong.”

Despite offering some cautious praise of Wentz and the Eagles, Scott isn’t willing to crown the rookie quarterback, noting that Mark Sanchez faltered after also starting 3-0 as a rookie. The former NFL linebacker added that two of the Eagles win came against “subpar teams” and that they caught an injured Steelers team at the right time.

“Could he be the real deal? Yes, but I’m not about to judge and call a rookie the real deal until he’s been in the league for three years,” Scott said, saying he was going to withhold judgment on Wentz until after the Eagles' Week 8 matchup with the Cowboys.

Carson Wentz should not get credit for the Eagles' success because he 'dinks and dunks' - Philly Voice

Now, I know what your rebuttals are going to be, Eagles fans.

The Eagles' heavy usage of screens serve as glorified running plays, therefore wildly skewing Wentz's numbers here. In other words, every time the Eagles run a screen, Wentz is chalked up with a big fat zero on yards traveled past the line of scrimmage. And maybe, just maybe, screens shouldn't be included in this metric as a measure of how often a quarterback will take shots down the field.

The Eagles have had huge second half leads, so why on Earth would they continue to take risky shots down the field?

The Eagles don't exactly have much in the way of vertical threats at the wide receiver position.

All of those rebuttals are wrong, and if you use them, you're dumb. Wentz is a dink-and-dunker, and should not be given undue credit for the Eagles' success so far

Analyzing Sports and You - Hegelbon.Tumblr

It seems to me that the football analytics community ought to preemptively do the same thing. The specter of having an outdated draft claim akin to “Brandon Allen is better than Paul Goldschmidt” is scary enough to my mind that any analyst worth their salt would immediately doubt any sort of received thought they considered true. And yet, critiques (valid ones!) of management, drafting strategy, and racist pigeonholing of players in particular skill positions have lead analytical football writers to fall into the trap of proving others wrong instead of looking at what’s in front of them. This is what leads to hot takes about “the kind” of quarterback that can succeed, or breathless mockery of teams at the top of the draft or thereabouts who “reach” for a bad player. There’s a player every year who is a special player – Myles Jack this year, and partly Jalen Ramsey – and players who are overrated. Yes, this is about Carson Wentz.

Why watching made Wentz and Embiid better - Inquirer

Wentz missed three preseason games because of two fractured ribs, and Embiid sat out two full seasons because of a broken bone in his right foot. Yet Wentz has toyed with the Browns, the Bears, and the Steelers, and whenever you ask someone who has witnessed Embiid's progress, How good can be if he stays healthy?, the most common response is a soft Whoa and a gradual widening of the eyes. How can these guys be so promising - and in Wentz's case, so gobsmackingly fantastic so far - if they've spent so little time playing and so much time watching?

Maybe it's because they've spent so much time watching. Richard Hass, a cognitive psychologist at Philadelphia University, said in a recent phone interview that Wentz's and Embiid's performances and potential get to the heart of questions that psychological and neurological researchers have long been trying to answer: What is the source of expertise? What is the best way to become great at something? "Learning to outperform your peers consistently has a lot to do with practice," Hass said. "The debate is, what does practice mean?"