This week the Eagles play a talented, yet underwhelming, Packers team. Let’s see what the stats say as always, using Sports Info Solutions.

Tendencies

Eagles Offense

The Eagles continue to increase their usage of 13 personnel, despite the loss of Dallas Goedert, so I will continue to hope they use it less this week. It has not been successful and I think with the current tight ends they have, they should rely a lot more on 11 personnel.

The rest of the offense remains very similar from week to week. We did see a slight uptick in motion last week but nothing dramatic has changed.

Eagles Defense

The defense remains very similar, especially their use of personnel which has been the same basically all year.

The increase in the past two weeks that we have seen is the stacked box % going up. I imagine Jonathan Gannon doesn’t actually want to do this as much and will hope that Linval Joseph and Suh will enable him to get that number back to where it was before.

Packers Offense

The Packers have two running backs they really like and they try to get them on the field as much as possible. The Eagles watching Aaron Jones extremely carefully as he’s a top 5 running back in my opinion.

I was surprised by some of these runners, considering the Packers head coach Matt LaFleur comes from the Shanahan tree of coaches. I expected to see a higher % motion, I wonder if this goes back to Aaron Rodgers asking for the offense to be ‘simplified’. Still, watch out for the RPO/play-action and motion on Sunday night.

This is interesting. Despite having Rodgers at quarterback, the Packers are not afraid to run into a stacked box and they throw the highest % of screen passes in the entire league.

Packers Defense

The Packers' defense is willing to get into ‘base’ so I wonder if the Eagles will try and throw from 12 personnel in order to get the Packers to play with only 4 defensive backs

The Packers play with a light box mainly so the Eagles will have chances to run the football. This is mainly a two-high defense so I expect the Eagles to focus on running the ball early on.

The Packers love playing with a defensive back in the middle of the field (MOFC) so expect to see the Eagles target the sidelines in this game. The blitz numbers are by far the most interesting here. The Packers blitz 41% of the time! That’s extremely high. More on that later...

Statistical Matchup

Eagles Offense vs. Packers Defense

The Eagles' numbers have slightly dipped recently, but this is still a top 5 offense. The Packers' defense is talented and doesn’t give up a huge amount of passing yards a game, but they can absolutely be run on. The ‘EPA per-rush numbers suggests a bad running defense and I hope the Eagles target that immediately.

Eagles Defense vs. Packers Offense

For all the recent criticism of the Eagles' defense, they remain the number 1 defense in yards per play, yards per pass attempt, and takeaways. That seems good to me. The Packers' offense has been incredibly disappointing and they somehow rank 26th in points per game. However, the EPA numbers and yards per play numbers suggest they have been a little bit unlucky to score so few points. I think this is a better offense than the numbers suggest and with Aaron Rodgers having a new weapon in Christian Watson (who I loved pre-draft), this offense may cause the Eagles offense a few problems. I just hate playing against Aaron Rodgers so I’m overthinking everything this week.

2 Key Matchups

Eagles offense vs. the blitz

As mentioned above, the Packers love to blitz. Does it actually help their defense or not? Let’s look at some numbers.

When the Packers send 5 or more rushers, opposing quarterbacks are 73/113 (64%) for 925 yards (8.1 YPA), 10 TDs, and 3 INTs. They have 71 total pressures which works out as 1 pressure every 1.59 snaps.

When the Packers send 4 or less rushers, opposing quarterbacks are 117/178 (65%) for 1339 yards (7.5 YPA), 6 TDs, and 5 INTs. They have 85 total pressures which works out as 1 pressure every 2.09 snaps.

In summary, the Packers get more pressure when they rush 5+ but the defense is clearly worse against the pass so I have no idea why they have the highest blitz rate in the NFL. It will be very interesting to see if the Packers keep blitzing because the Eagles have been far better against the blitz the past few weeks.

Eagles defense vs screen

The Packers have run the most screens of any team on offense so the Eagles will have to be prepared for this. The Packers are 60/69 on screens this year for 368 yards (5.3 YPA) with 2 TDs. 2 TDs is the joint highest in the league and 368 yards is the 2nd highest. No surprise considering they run them the most!

The Eagles’ defense has allowed 34/39 on screens this year for 243 yards (6.2 YPA) and 0 TDs. Allowing 6.2 YPA against screens is actually pretty high so this is something that is worth watching.

That’s all for this week. As always, any questions just let me know!