Ready to bail on the Eagles' 2015 season?!
The offensive line can't block. Therefore, the pricey free-agent running backs can't run. The receivers can't hang onto passes. The offense goes three-and-out after three-and-out, putting up 0 points and hardly any yards for an entire half of football. The team is committing turnovers with alarming regularity. And even when they're the beneficiaries of a turnover, they can't do anything with it.
As for the defense, the big free-agent cornerback, one of the biggest prizes of the offseason, is getting torched again and again. The defense is getting winded from spending so much time on the field. The coaches are slow to adjust to opponents' game plans, and the team can't bring pressure consistently, despite some of the league's most talented players in the front 7.
This is not what we expected to see out of this team.
The offense has been awful, and the defense hasn't been good enough to make up for it. Looks like our worst nightmares have come true.
Cartoon by Rob Tornoe
The team looks like crap right now, but I'm going to give it a couple more games to see how Chip Kelly and the rest of the coaching staff adjusts. The original plan obviously didn't go quite as smoothly as Kelly thought it would; a good coach will tweak that strategy appropriately. I think the linemen will start to gel (as long as nobody gets injured!), the coaches will adjust (move to more max protect, play Trey Burton as a halfback), and the offense will start to light up.
The current outcry from fans and media observers reminds me of those years when the Giants won those Super Bowls against New England. The Giants started 0-2 in 2007 before knocking off the then-undefeated Patriots in the Super Bowl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XLII#Teams).
In 2011, they started 1-1, with an 0-4 mid-season slump (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_New_York_Giants_season#Regular_season) before again heating up in time for the playoffs and defeating the Patriots in the Super Bowl.
During the struggles in both of those seasons, Giants fans were calling for heads to roll.
Seattle started off poorly last season, and many fans assumed that the team would fail to make the playoffs after suffering from a 'Super Bowl hangover'--yet the team returned to form later in the season, and they ended up in the Super Bowl again!
It doesn't matter how you begin the season. It matters how you end the season.
This rough start will test the team's character. If they're mentally weak, they'll throw in the towel. But if they're the right kind of football players--tough, disciplined guys; the kind of guys Chip Kelly has been looking for all along--they'll keep fighting.
And once this team: a) gets going with that us-against-everyone, nobody-believes-in-us mentality, and b) solves the run-blocking issues, they'll shut up all the negativity in a hurry.
I think the Eagles need more talent and depth on the offensive line. They still need more talent in the secondary. And the receivers need more seasoning (or at least to hang onto the ball!). These things will come with time. But for this season, all we can do is to hope for health and hard work out of all the starters, and a change of approach on the part of the coaches to mask the current deficiencies.
After this putrid stretch, some fans are calling Chip Kelly a flop, a failed experiment, a college coach who just can't hack it in the NFL.
We'll see what they're saying in Week 17.
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