The NFC East picture became a little bit clearer last night with the Eagle’s 33-27 win in Dallas. With this win, it’s safe to say the Cowboys season is all but dead, leaving just the Birds and the Giants to duke it out for the division. This may be one of the worst divisions in football, but the Eagles and Giants don’t meet again until the last week of the season in New York, so things could get very interesting until them.
There is never a greater peace in the world than Philadelphia the day after beating Dallas. Imagine something along the lines of the You Make My Dreams scene from 500 Days of Summer. Now I hate to be the one to disrupt this state of pure harmony, but it looks like the weather forecast is calling for rainclouds right over everyone’s parade.
Dallas is dead and the Eagles live to fight another day, but it took the Bird’s an extra quarter to beat a team that hasn’t won a game since week two. This team is getting better, but there are some things I just can’t over look.
The Eagles continued their growing trend of starting out at a glacially slow pace, both offensive and defensively. The Eagles have scored a grand total of 10 points in the first quarter this season, they have failed to score in six first quarters so far this season. The lack of first quarter offense has a lot to do with Sammy Bradford, he is one of the NFL’s worst QBs in the first half, while his QBR sits around the mid 90’s in the second. The defense has also allowed touchdowns on their last three opening drives, giving up, on average, a little over 10 yards per play. This shows that the Eagles are ending the first quarter with at least a 7-0 deficit they need to work out of and with how anemic this offense has been, playing from behind is a position that I never feel comfortable in.
The Eagle’s offense got outscored by the Cowboys offense and I think that’s the thing that has me most concerned from this game. The only reason this game went to overtime was because of a Jordan Hicks pick six, and he’s now out for the year, so it’s not like the Eagles will get to lean on him much for the rest of this season. This is an offensive minded team that’s bad at scoring, that’s a bad combination.
Last night the Eagles added to a list that is only getting more and more embarrassing as the season goes on. Matt Cassel now joins Brandon Weeden, Kirk Cousins, and Ryan Fitzpatrick as just a few of the elite level quarterbacks who have scored on the Eagles this season. And it wasn’t just once, Matt Cassel scored on the Eagles three times. That sucks. Then there’s the fact that two of those scores were to Cole Beasley. That sucks too.
Really when you get down to it, the Cowboys are a bad football team and they pushed the Eagles to overtime. Sure a win is a win, but is a convincing win really asking for all that much? Yeah the Eagles beat Dallas, but so have a lot of teams.
Good teams beat good teams, and that’s something the Eagles just never seem to do. Now the Eagles have a very easy schedule in one of the easiest division in football, so playoffs are still the expectation. But anything more than that is a little bit in doubt until this team can show me anything close to quality team.
Snowballs & Batteries 