It was fun while it lasted. With seemingly half the team hurt, the Eagles’ crew of backups held a 10-point lead into late in the fourth quarter against the Rams Sunday at the Linc.
But the Eagles’ 2nd-half woes continued, and the Rams outscored them 14-0 after halftime – all 14 points in the final four minutes – and rallied to a 24-20 win that dropped the Eagles to 2-2.
The Eagles have now been outscored 54-20 in the second half this year, including 31-0 in their losses to the Bears and Rams the last two weeks.
Here’s our 10 Instant Observations off a crushing loss.
1. Total collapse in the final minutes. Just a complete meltdown in every aspect. Outcoached, outplayed, out-adjusted. Once again, the Eagles’ defense, so good the whole game, just fell apart in the fourth quarter, allowing two long touchdown drives while falling to pieces on offense. It’s part coaching and part execution, but the Eagles are just a bad team in the second half, and they’ve now been outscored 47-20 this year after halftime and 31-0 the last two weeks, which is inexcusable. Maybe it was just a case of all the injuries catching up with the Eagles. But you can’t use that as an excuse. You’re up 10 at home with 4 ½ minutes left you can’t lose that football game. I don’t care how many players are missing. But they did and this team has a lot to figure out. Just to put this loss in context, the Eagles were 95-3 in their last 98 games when they led by 10 points going into the fourth quarter. Yep, 95-3. In-freaking-excusable.
2. Just how putrid was the offense Sunday? They did score a couple touchdowns, but both were on short fields, 17 yards after a long Britain Covey punt return and 35 yards after Cooper DeJean’s interception. They netted just 172 yards, they averaged 3.0 yards per play, they went 0-for-12 on third down, they averaged less than four yards per carry, they had just 75 net passing yards and 12 first downs and they didn’t have a passing first down in the second half. I mean, how do you go 0-for-12 on third down? Even Kevin Patullo didn’t do that. And since the NFL began tracking third downs, the Eagles had never been 0-for-12. They haven’t scored a 2nd-half point since the Titans game. You don’t want to blame everything on Sean Mannion. There were a ton of injuries, Saquon Barkley left early, the offensive line had only two guys left from the same position on opening day, Dallas Goedert is still out. Still, this offense just isn’t competitive for long stretches of every game, in particular the second half, and we’re a quarter of the way through the season now, and he’s not the new guy anymore. Mannion has to be better when it comes to in-game adjustments. And everything else. He has a lot to figure out.
3. Second half. Again. Good lord. The Eagles have now been outscored 54-20 in the second half this year, 31-0 the last two weeks and they’ve been outgained by an average of 202-103. That’s insane. The Cowboys scored more second-half points today (28) than the Eagles have all year. The Rams outgained them 260-72 Sunday. How does an NFL team not understand you have to play 60 minutes to beat a good team? How can an entire team just fall to pieces when the game is on the line? How can so many players just stop making plays at crunch time? The Eagles on Sunday had four first downs in the second half and the Rams had 16. Seriously? Come on. And I put the blame for this squarely on the coaching staff, Nick Sirianni in particular. He’s responsible for everything we see on the football field. And what we’re seeing after halftime is a football team that’s inept, unprepared, overmatched and embarrassed on a weekly basis. Pathetic.
4. Once again, the Eagles hit double digits in penalties, the second straight game they’ve done that. And they negated a number of potentially big plays. It just seems like whenever there’s a big play on either side of the ball, whenever the Eagles build up a little momentum, there’s a defensive holding, an illegal formation, an offsides, something. This is the first time since 2016 they’ve committed 10 or more penalties in consecutive games, and right now this team isn’t good enough to make those sort of mistakes. If you’re the Rams you can get away with mistakes, and they did that Sunday. They had eight penalties and two turnovers and still found a way to win. The Eagles aren’t good enough to do that.
5. I did think some of the Eagles backups did some good things. With DeVonta Smith, Zack Baun, Lane Johnson and Marcus Epps inactive, Landon Dickerson and Dallas Goedert already hurt and Saquon Barkley leaving the game in the first quarter with a hamstring injury and then Quinyon Mitchell leaving at the start of the third quarter and then Jonathan Greenard following him to the sideline later in the third quarter, the Eagles were missing quite a bit of star power. Darius Cooper caught two touchdowns, including a miracle TD on a tipped pass, Jeremiah Trotter was all over the field, finishing with 15 tackles, although he had a bad miss on the game-winning touchdown. Michael Carter made a bunch of plays at safety, and Tank Bigsby got rolling a little in the fourth quarter. Dickerson, Johnson, Mitchell, Greenard and Baun are all Pro Bowlers and Smith and Goedert are Pro Bowl-caliber guys. It took the Rams a while to figure out how to take advantage of the missing Eagles, but once they did it was over.
6. Jalen Hurts threw the two early touchdowns and didn’t have an interception, but it was a very tough game for him with just 12-for-27 passing for 44 percent, four sacks and a miserable second half with 2-for-9 for 10 yards and two sacks for 10 yards. That’s zero net passing yards in the half. Hurts really struggled against the Rams’ constant blitzes and part of that issue is that he’s missing Goedert, his favorite hot receiver. And he was missing Barkley, too, another option against the blitz. The Rams knew he didn’t have a comfort zone against the blitz and they just brought blitz after blitz and the Eagles, with their makeshift offensive line, just couldn’t deal with it. Until the o-line starts playing better and Hurts gets some of his weapons back and gets better at blitz recognition, opposing defenses are just going to continue to blitz the heck out of Hurts. Until he makes them pay, why would they stop doing it?
7. There was a stretch during training camp this summer where for about two weeks Darius Cooper would make at least one ridiculous circus highlight catch every day. Diving, lunging, leaping, you name it. It was fun to watch, but you wondered if he’d be able to make those plays when they counted. Guess what. Yeah. He can. Cooper’s 2nd-quarter touchdown catch was a masterpiece of instinct, determination, focus and concentration. Just a remarkable play by anyone, much less a 24-year-old undrafted free agent. The Eagles had 2nd-and-11 on the Rams’ 18 and Hurts’ throw into the end zone looked like it might get picked off by safety Quentin Lake. But Lake was only able to tip the ball, and Cooper leaped, controlled the loose ball in midair and tumbled to the ground turning his body upward so the ball was above him. Cooper added a second touchdown later in the second quarter and now has three touchdowns in his first 17 career games. Undrafted. Unreal. Not a lot of positives from this game, but Cooper’s performance was one.
8. OK, a positive sign for the defense. After failing to record a takeaway in their first three games for the first time in franchise history, the Eagles got two Sunday with Drew Mukuba and Cooper DeJean both picking off Matt Stafford. First regular-season game with two interceptions since the Vikings in Week 7 last year, when Mukuba and Jalyx Hunt picked off Carson Wentz at U.S. Bank Stadium, with Hunt running his back for a pick-6. On the Rams’ first drive, Mukuba picked off Matt Stafford at the Rams’ 49 and came up with a nice 24-yard return. The Eagles got down to the Rams’ 7-yard-line but only managed a short field goal. As for Mukuba, he did not play well the first three games of the season, so it was good to see him make a big play. He’s the first player the Eagles have drafted who’s had three INTs in his first 15 career games since Jordan Hicks in 2015. Nice INT, nice return. Mukuba needs to keep making those type of plays because this is why they drafted him in the second round last year. Because of his potential as a big-time playmaker. Need more of them, but that was encouraging.
9. What is this offense? What’s their identity? Anybody? I just don’t get what they’re trying to achieve. What are they leaning on when there’s a critical play? What do they believe in? What do they want to do? What do they want this to look like? What is the plan each week? I just don’t get what it’s supposed to look like, and when you don’t have an identity, you don’t have anything. Sometimes it seems like they want everything to revolve around the passing game, but it’s been inconsistent and pass protection has been shaky. Sometimes it seems like they want to be a running team, but they haven’t run the ball consistently and Saquon Barkley hasn’t been able to stay healthy. A couple years ago, every time the Eagles’ offense took the field you felt like you were going to see something special. When they began a drive, you expected them to score and it was surprising when they didn’t. Now it’s almost shocking when they do score. When you don’t really know what you want to be, it’s tough to be great. I don’t know what this is offense is, but I do know it’s very tough to watch right now.
10. Jake Elliott was the worst kicker in the NFL over the last two years, but he looks like a different guy so far this year. On top of his 58-yarder against the Titans, he made a 56-yarder Sunday and is now 4-for-4 so far this year. His two field goals of at least 56 yards match his entire total for 2024 and 2025 combined, when he was 2-for-8 from at least 56 yards. Elliott now has 11 career field goals of at least 56 yards, 6th-most in NFL history. Most importantly, he looks like the Jake Elliott of 2017 through 2023. Good for Howie Roseman for sticking with him when he made just 48 of 63 kicks for 76 percent over the last two seasons and became the first kicker since Josh Scobee in 2008 and 2009 to make less than 78 percent in back-to-back years. Would have been easy to replace him, but it’s sure looking like it would have been a mistake.