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Eagles All-22 Film Review: Robert Quinn can bounce back to form in Philly

A look at the tape leaves reason to believe.

Chicago Bears v Las Vegas Raiders Photo by Chris Unger/Getty Images

The Eagles made a trade! You all know the details by now, I don’t want to get into the money (the Bears are paying anyway!) or the compensation, I only want to look at the player. As Robert Quinn has been around a while it seemed weird doing a full scouting report, so I thought I would separate this article into 2021 and 2022 clips and then give an overall summary at the end. I didn’t want to watch further back as I am not sure how much that will really tell us about Quinn’s play moving forward which is what we care about now.

2021

I won’t go through every clip here as I wanted to get this piece done quickly before the weekend’s games. But you can read my thoughts in the tweet with the video!

In a lot of the clips I’ve posted so far, you can see him stand up and rush from a wide position. This next clip makes me really excited because I expect him to be used in the Eagles 5 man fronts too and he has proved he can play the edge but also was used as the 4i technique (defender in between the nose tackle and the edge) which is an excellent sign.

2022

With a lot of talk of his declining play this year, I thought it made sense to split the article into two. See if you can spot a significant decline!

I’m sure you’ve all seen the stats about him being double-teamed but I watched this game closely as I was interested to see how the Packers handled Quinn and it felt like they ran away from him a lot as well as doubling him too.

Using Sports Info Solutions as always, I had a quick look at Quinn’s impact on the Bears defense this year using EPA. The Bears defense is better when he’s on the field, both in run and pass situations.

Overall

Quinn obviously fits the bill as a very good rotational pass rusher. I think it is fair to say he has declined this year slightly and looks a little bit less explosive to me (you can still see the ability to bend the edge though) but I also think it’s probably fair to point out he’s playing on a not-very-good Bears team who are in a rebuild and don’t have a huge amount of talent around him. I would not be surprised to see him bounce back to form with the Eagles, especially as he will play fewer snaps which will help him stay explosive on a snap-to-snap basis. I won’t pretend to have watched every single snap from this year but it seemed to me that teams were scheming against Quinn this year (there were a lot of runs away from him) and I am sure you have all seen the numbers going around but how often he has been double teamed. This happens when you lose a player like Khalil Mack and defenses can focus on you more.

Personally, at this stage of his career, I expect him to be behind Haason Reddick/Josh Sweat as an EDGE defender but he will provide the Eagles with really good depth. He’s not just a pass rusher either, his run defense was better than I thought, and his issue in run defense was more to do with missing tackles and occasionally failing to set the edge, rather than being moved in the run game. He will give up a few penalties too as he does get caught offside a little too much as he tries to time the snap perfectly a lot. The final weakness I saw from him is that he will get caught upfield when rushing the pasher as he takes quite a wide angle because he likes to win by bending the edge and this means on 3-5 step drops he can overrun the play quite frequently.

Because of the way he rushes the passer, I think he will be an excellent fit on 3rd and long situations when he can really get upfield and bend the edge. Despite that, he’s not a one-trick pass rusher and can win with outstanding hand usage, and does have a bull rush in his locker too. But it’s not the way he wins the best.

There are certain positions you simply cannot have too many talented players at. Pass rushers are probably top of the list alongside pass catchers. The Eagles are a really good football team who are Super Bowl contenders this year. When that is the case, you need to do whatever you can to add talented players who will help you win it all. Robert Quinn is a talented player who increases the Eagles chance of winning it all this year. It’s really that simple!

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