Maybe a Desperation Move Is What The Eagles Needed
Changing your defensive playcaller in the middle of a season is a desperate move. There is no getting around that. 10-3 teams don’t do that. But that is just what the Eagles have done. Matt Patricia will take over play-calling duties, essentially taking over as the Defensive Coordinator. They can say Desai is still the DC all they want, but if Patricia calls plays, and runs the show on game day, he is the DC in everything but name.
The question is, was this called for? The Eagles defense has been a mess this season. They are at the bottom of the league in points allowed, passing yards allowed, 3rd down conversion rate, and pretty much every metric you would judge a defense by. They had some good games, like holding the Chiefs and Dolphins to under 20 points. But for the most part, they have been a mess. And while a lot of that can be attributed to them having less talent than last year, especially at Linebacker and Safety, some of that has to fall onto the DC as well.
Jeff Kerr from CBS joined the John Kincade Show this morning and talked about how the players seemed to lose confidence in Desai as the season went on:
“I don’t think the players had enough confidence in him. Sean Desai is a smart guy, but never struck me as a guy with a ton of confidence. If you can’t trust your coach, how can you trust that the system is going to work?”
This tracks with some of what we were hearing leading into the week. There were anonymous sources coming out that the players were not happy with how the defense was being run. That followed by him being replaced, lends validity to the sense that players were not particularly happy with Desai as the DC.
Matt Patricia has a lot of issues. He was a bad head coach and ostracized some of the players, one of whom plays CB for this team. But he does have a history of success as a DC. In his 6 years with the Patriots, they were top 10 in points allowed every single season. Granted, having Bill Belichick as your Head Coach makes things much easier for a DC, but he oversaw a very successful defense that won multiple Super Bowls. He may not know how to be a head coach, but he knows how to call plays on defense.
So while it is weird for a 10-3 team to make a move this desperate, maybe it is called for. If Desai had lost the locker room, as many are claiming, they almost had to make a move. The last two weeks were brutally bad for the Eagles, and they had to do something. You can’t change the talent on the team anymore, but you can change the person in charge of that talent.
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Will this move work? Who knows. History says no. Most times mid-season changes do not magically fix things. But there are some cases of it working. We saw the Bills fire their Offensive Coordinator, and their season immediately turned around. We also saw the Steelers make a similar move, and it only made things worse. But it is hard to fault the Eagles for being desperate when the situation called for desperation.
Make no mistake, despite the record, this is a team on the ropes. While the offense has struggled, the defense has been a mess all year. And something had to give. They couldn’t just keep their head down and act like everything was fine. So while making Matt Patricia the DC is an unprecedented and desperate move, it may also be the right thing to do.
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