Eagles Film Review: Observations from the Browns preseason game

Quick reminder: it’s only preseason and I don’t have access to any preseason all22 so I’ll try and keep this short and sweet. I also tend to to focus on potential starters and other important players as they are the most interesting!

Offense

Let’s start with the quarterback. Gardner Minshew made some nice throws down the field and has a good read of the offense but it’s pretty clear to me his arm is not good enough to be a starting quarterback. It just doesn’t have much juice to it, sadly.

I don’t really get into scheme stuff much in preseason, but I do think it was worth noting the Eagles clearly went with a run heavy approach in this one. There was a lot of under center stuff and the passing game was clearly built off of the running game, with a lot of RPOs. I enjoyed seeing the Eagles run it down the Browns on 2nd and 9 when they went with 2-high coverage. If teams want to keep running 2 deep safeties against the Eagles next year, just keep running it!

This was also a classic Jeff Stoutland run game. We saw pin-pull a lot but also some inside zone, outside zone and I believe we saw some DUO too! The Eagles run game remains one of the most multiple in the league, and this was all without a mobile quarterback. I thought Boston Scott ran pretty well too.

Just like last week, there was only one guy I was watching on nearly every snap. Cam Jurgens. This guy has had about the best preseason an offensive lineman can have. I spoke about him at length last week so I won’t go into much detail here, but he is absolutely flying around and straight up wrecking linebackers in space.

It wasn’t just Jurgens that impressed me though, the entire offensive line looked really good. Stoutland is an unbelievable coach. I thought Andre Dillard run blocked really well too, which was good.

This was the block of the game though, by Jurgens. Duh.

A couple of other minor notes on the passing game, Quez Watkins made a nice play here.

I also really liked seeing Zach Pascal used on this play, this fits his skillset perfectly.

It was good to see Randy Moss Deon Cain make an impressive few catches as well. He obviously has good hands but didn’t separate much on any of his catches so I wouldn’t get too carried away. Let’s not talk too much about a couple of Jalen Reagor’s routes either but... they weren’t very good.

Defense

This was a quiet one on defense and not a great deal stood out to me. It was pretty vanilla and I didn’t see many pressures or disguised coverage. I hate doing this because I feel like I pick on him a lot, but I couldn’t stop watching Davion Taylor. He could not get off blocks today, at all. He was a disaster in the run game and didn’t anticipate anything well either. I just don’t think he’s very good against the run and he’s a massive liability when he’s not in coverage. I thought K’Von Wallace did actually play really well in this one and made a couple of really nice plays, so that was pretty good to see as I haven’t seen a great deal from him in his career so far but he stood out today in a positive way.

To be fair, I didn’t think his partner Nakobe Dean did a great deal either but it’s only his second ever game and he still avoided blocks better than Davion Taylor did. It was also good to see the Eagles blitz Dean as they did this last week too and that tells me they understand his strengths and are willing to use him in this way.

K’Von Wallace would have been pretty happy to see Jaquiski Tartt playing with the 3’s this week. Tartt looked like he was desperate to hit someone throughout the second half and he took his chance!

I thought a few of the backups cornerbacks struggled in this one too, in particular Kary Vincent Jr. I guess it’s worth noting that we didn’t see much from Jordan Davis either, and none of the edge rushers did anything too noteworthy either.

The best play of the game was almost certainly Devon Allen’s deep touchdown and the subsequent celebration.

Only a short breakdown this week, but we are not too far away from the real action!