Eagles All-22 Film Review: Observations from the win over the Lions

We won a game! I get to break down a win! Yes, this is against a winless Lions who were bad but there was a lot of interesting film this week on both sides of the ball. I got a bit carried away and filmed quite a lot of videos this week so buckle up...

I will be breaking down film on my Twitter account and then uploading the tweets with some more analysis in this piece. I obviously cannot post everything so I will focus on certain things each week that stand out to me. I might see something a few times on film but only upload one example as you don’t need to see everything, so you will have to take my word if I say that I have seen something multiple times.

I am going to break down the offense followed by the defense each week and I will post the plays in order so you can see how the game played out. Sometimes I might focus on a specific area, I will see how each game plays out. I am simply choosing the most important plays and highlighting some players that stood out to me. As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments and I look forward to discussing the game with you all. Let’s get to the film!

OFFENSE

Apologies for starting with a negative but can we just bin this play please? Doug Pederson ran it far too often so we can stop now please, I’m bored of watching it.

The Eagles decided it was legal to use motion in the run game this week which was exciting!

I haven’t seen a lot of good sequencing this year but we saw it on this drive. They used Reagor as a decoy a few times then started to hand the ball to him and you could see the Lions defense were lost a couple of times. This is good! More of this please.

This is becoming the Eagles number 1 staple concept in the pass game right now. It is clear that Jalen Hurts is calm in the pocket when they call flood and he seems to throw the intermediate route with good accuracy consistently. The Eagles ran it successfully a few times last week and this week. It is nice to see a staple concept being used more than once (and run from different formations/personnel) because the Eagles offense has been a bit random this year .

No analysis needed!

The Eagles are now a run first team from under center. This was the case last week too (as I mentioned in the article) but it is clear that they see this as the best way to win football games right now. I agree. We know Hurts is limited is a passer and we know the Eagles have some elite run blockers on the offensive line. It is a shame it took so long to become a run first offense but I am glad to see the Eagles finally commit to it.

One reason why they have to be a run first offense... Hurts is still struggling with processing. I can only assume the late safety movement confuses him here but I just don’t know why you aren’t throwing this football. This is exactly the coverage you want with this concept and the WR is open. Throw the ball!

Nothing fancy here, I just like to see this from your number 1 receiver even when he isn’t producing big numbers.

There were about 3 or 4 plays this week where Hurts looked an elite athlete. He is going to stick around in this league whatever his role because there is always a place for someone this athletic.

Wow! This is basically a 4 man flood concept, I remember reading about it recently (link here) and it was referred to as ‘4 strong’. I am 90% sure I listened to a podcast recently where it was brought up as something that teams are beginning to run more frequently this year. It’s nice to see Sirianni looking at what some others are doing and adding some plays to the playbook!

Also, thanks to @denizselman33 on Twitter who mentioned this wasn’t the only time the Eagles ran this.

I don’t really need to analyse this play as you can all see how bad it is... he just needs to get better. I don’t know if he ever will. But you can’t be this frantic in the pocket especially when your offensive lineman is dominating.

And then the very next play he does this! Isn’t evaluating players fun?

That’s all for the offense, I thought it was a great performance by Nick Sirianni and the offensive lineman absolutely dominated! I think this has to be the Eagles identity moving forward, long may it continue.

DEFENSE

It was very clear early on, that this was not going to be the standard Eagles defense (2High, zone coverage, lack of late movement). I also wanted to give Marcus Epps a mention as I thought he had a really good game which was nice to see!

Josh Sweat had a few plays where he looked like the best athlete on the field. He has the ability to make some serious ‘wow’ plays.

TJ Edwards had a really, really good game. The whole defense was SO much more aggressive this week after I criticized them last week for being passive. This week was the opposite. They blitzed. Played man coverage. But more importantly, they got downhill fast and tried to prevent short gains and not just try and stop big plays.

I don’t have the numbers but I feel pretty certain that this is the most single high and man coverage that the Eagles have run this year on defense.

Breaking: The Eagles are disguising overages and using movement right before the snap to confuse the quarterback! Is this Jonathan Gannon’s defense still? This is the opposite to last week!

The Eagles actually had good linebacker play last week. I can’t remember the last time I typed that sentence. When we had Jordan Hicks and Nigel Bradham?!

Now this ... this is interesting. The Eagles’ coverages have been so vanilla this week but it definitely got a bit more spicy this week! This is also exactly what you want to do against Jared Goff as he struggles when the picture post snap isn’t clear. I was really happy to see the Eagles defense evolve into a much more interesting unit this week. I am excited to see what we do this week against Herbert who is really good if the pre-snap picture is clear. I hope we continue to run some more interesting coverages and don’t just sit in cover 4 zone in order to prevent big plays. More of this please...

This is purely speculation... but I really think Goff here thinks Slay is playing as a Cover 4 defender and not as the curl/flat defender in Cover 3. If Slay is a little bit quicker to react this had pick 6 potential. The Eagles FINALLY really started to mix up their coverages and disguise them to try and confuse the opposing quarterback. Maybe Jonathan Gannon is reading all our tweets?!

I could have gone into way more detail on Milton Williams this week but there was too much to highlight! I am so happy that Williams is playing inside in this Eagles defense though. I liked his college tape a lot but did not see him as having the traits to play as an EDGE defender so I am really happy to see him playing inside. Power was seen as a weakness of his too so this is great to see.

That was a long one. I thought it might be a slightly boring game to break down in truth but I was pleasantly surprised! Let’s hope it continues. Until next week!