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It’s been over a year now and people still cannot get over the Eagles being so incredibly effective at the quarterback sneak. Sure, they may not run it the same as others teams, and sometimes may utilize a little push from the back, but they are well within the rules of the game to do so.
This fact has really come to bother people. But that seems more like a them problem, that they are trying to make an us problem.
The way the Eagles do the QB sneak is legal. They practice it a ton, have several varieties of the call, and have one of the best o-line minds coaching it up in Jeff Stoutland. Jason Kelce said on this week’s New Heights Show, that even if he had retired and wasn’t around to literally lead the charge, Stoutland would just have another guy in there doing the same thing.
It’s something that teams had to have studied a lot in the offseason. When it became apparent that the league wasn’t going to address the play with a rule change, other teams needed to figure out a way to make it work for them. But, we’ve seen in the first three weeks of the 2023 season, it’s not really that simple. You can scheme things up any way you want, but unless you have the big bodies up front that the Eagles do, combined with a quarterback who can squat 600 pounds, it’s not always going to work. This was even true for Shane Steichen now in Indy, who knows better than almost anyone else outside of Philly how it works.
What started out as an annoyance for those who couldn’t figure out a way to stop it, has grown into this national media outrage over the legalities of it. The outrage has continued to grow and now has adults, from behind their keyboards and their podcast mics, suggesting defenses find a way to make Jalen Hurts pay for his success. It’s gross and irresponsible.
Chris Simms on the #Eagles Brotherly Shove/QB Sneak: “If I was a Defensive Coach, I’d be going ‘Go headhunting on the QB here. Go crazy. Try to kill the QB. That’s what I’d do. I don’t mean it like that. Well, I don’t mean kill, but make him pay, make him think twice about it.” pic.twitter.com/aJhmehlNFR
— Eagles Nation (@PHLEaglesNation) September 27, 2023
As head coach Nick Sirianni said post-game, if teams don’t like it, find a way to stop it.
Until then, it’s a perfectly legal way to ram the ball down the throats of an opponent, and I hope the Eagles do it 25 times a game at this point just to piss people off.
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