This Matchup Never Seems To Favor Jalen Hurts

There are few things more daunting than the Eagles injury report at the moment, but the looming matchup in Tampa Bay in advance of the bye week looks like a monumental challenge. If there already weren’t a lot of things stacked against them, the history between Jalen Hurts and Buccaneers Coach Todd Bowles could be the origin story of a Marvel villain. How the Eagles will navigate the injuries while trying to solve the puzzle that Bowles has been will be fascinating.

The trip to New Orleans may have ended with a victory, but the injuries that occurred add to what was already a complicated situation. The Eagles have played the last two games without their star receiver AJ Brown and the results have been obvious. Brown unlocks the entire playbook for Kellen Moore and he still had the services of DeVonta Smith and Britain Covey to lean on.

This week will be a different story at Tampa. With Covey on IR and Smith recovering from a concussion they need other options to catch the ball. More Saquon in the slot could be an option and thankfully the Buccaneers rush defense has been problematic.

Running the ball could be an issue with both Lane Johnson and Mekhi Becton potentially being missing on the right side of the offensive line. Having quality replacements is important and Tyler Steen and Fred Johnson did a fantastic job. Tampa Bay will be game-planning to exploit their inexperience so Moore will have to adjust his plans.

Jalen Hurts has faced off against Tampa in the regular season in 2021 and in 2023. In both of those years he ended up meeting them again in the playoffs. The bad news is that he has only managed to emerge victorious once. That 1-3 record is something that Hurts would like to improve on but it’s going to be tough. When raving a Bowles defense these are the ugly truths.

Hurts is 80/141 passing, translating to a 57% completion percentage that is below his career numbers. The Bowles defensive scheme has done a great job of showing one thing and then doing another. It has confused Hurts and caused him to turn the ball over repeatedly.

That is the next bad news. In those 4 career games Hurts has thrown 5 interceptions while passing for only 4 touchdowns. Worse yet, the passing yards he has accumulated have been mostly during garbage time. The team has fallen behind often and then against a soft defensive scheme Hurts has put up those empty-calorie yards.

The Buccaneers poor rush defense creates a window of opportunity, but without the potential threat of top receivers to create balance it might be easier to defend the Eagles backs. If he can come up with a plan that brings the Eagles to a 3-1 record before the bye he will deserve the game ball. Jalen needs to be the reason his team has a chance to win, not the reason that they lose.

When the Saints scored a go-ahead TD with 4:38 left in the game, Eagles fans were likely thinking here we go again. A week after blowing a late lead the the Falcons, they did it again and were about to be 1-2. With no AJ Brown, no Lane Johnson, and no DeVonta Smith, could they actually go down the field and score a TD to reclaim the lead?

At the time on Twitter, fans did not seem confident. But that is exactly what they did. Hurts hit a wide-open Dallas Goedert in the flat, and he took off running for 61 yards. He was dragged down before he got into the End Zone, but Saquon eventually punched it in. On the following drive, Reed Blankenship picked off Carr, and that was all she wrote. The Eagles Wound up winning 15-12.

Related: Eagles Defense Makes A Statement In New Orleans

The 1st 3 games have not been pretty. Eagles fans will be justifiably mistrustful of ugly wins after last year, where they had 10 of them over the 1st 11 games. But 2-1 is 2-1. The Cowboys and Niners can't say that. Both of those teams would have taken ugly wins this week as opposed to both of them dropping 2 games in a row.

Should we look at this as a positive, or should we be worried going forward? How good was this defense in week 3? Could this offense be playing better than the numbers show? Are they leaving too many points on the board? Is Jalen Carter finally living up to the hype? How impressive was Dallas Goedert? And is Bryce Huff already a bust of a signing?

Let's break down the game. The good, the bad, and what we should take away going forward.

Anyone watching the game would have come away recognizing how good Jalen Carter was. He is still looking for his 1st sack this season, but sacks are not everything, and a defender can have a massive impact without actually recording a sack. Jalen Carter registered 4 pressures, 3 hurries, a QB hit, and deflected two passes. But those 4 pressures are not the 4 I am talking about here. More notable for me was his 4 defensive stops.

A stop is any tackle that counts as a successful play for the defense. That is a vague definition, but I got the stat from PFF, and this is how they define it.

Carter was terrible against the run in weeks 1 and 2. He was disappointing in the pass rush but still did make some impact. We also know that he is going to be able to get after the QB. But in the run game, he had just 1 stop over the first 2 games. But apart from just pressuring Derek Carr, he was helping shut down the run too. Jordan Davis added 2 stops, and a sack of his own. Those two, Carter and Davis, are so important to this team. It is no coincidence that the game they look great is the first week this defense looks great.

Dallas Goedert had his best game in an Eagles jersey on Sunday. 10 catches for 170 yards. There was another case where he was wide open, and Hurts didn't even see him, that would have gotten him a TD. The thing is, he did a lot of that after the catch. He averaged 11.9 yards after the catch per reception. 119 of his 170 yards came after the catch. On average, he was only 6.3 yards past the line of scrimmage when he caught the ball, but he still went off for 170 yards.

Running after the catch was always his biggest strength. They gameplanned to get him the ball in space, and he made the Saints pay. Including his 61-yard catch and run on the game-winning drive that set up a Saquon Barkley TD. He was only 4 yards deep when he caught it. Meaning the other 57 yards were all his legs. It was a great design by Moore, using Dotson as a distraction to make the Saints DBs run into each other, but Goedert was the one who ran 57 yards.

They needed that out of him with Brown and eventually Smith out of the game. He answered the call.

The Saints came into the game averaging over 400 yards per game, and over 40 points per game. The Eagles held them to 219 yards and 12 points. It was the hottest offense in the league, and the Eagles stuffed them. They allowed only 24.3 yards per drive. Coming into the year, the Saints only had 4 total drives where they didn't get at least that many yards. They only had 4 drives where they didn't score in the 1st 2 games. The eagles forced a punt or a turnover 6 drives this week.

Were the Saints playing a bit over their head in the 1st 2 weeks? Sure. They also did it to the Panthers and Cowboys, who both look terrible so far. But everyone expected them to pummel this defense. The Eagles were the worst run defense in the league coming into week 3, and they held Kamara to just 3.3 yards per carry. Rashid Shaheed was one of the most explosive WRs in the league, he got 0 catches despite 5 targets. The Eagles' defense deserves a ton of credit for dominating a good offense.

The Eagles offense is off to a slow start. They scored 34 points in week 1, but then just 21 in week 2, and only 15 in week 3. That said, they are moving the ball with relative ease. Their 411.7 yards per game is 2nd in the NFL behind only the Ravens. It is points that matter, and they need to find a way to turn those yards into scores, but there is a great offense ready to emerge. They just need to cut down on the mistakes.

Hurts has turned it over 3 times this season when inside Jake Elliott's FG range, twice in the red zone. Sirianni has controversially gone for it, leaving points on the board. Points that could have made the difference in week 2, and points that may have made the week 3 win much easier. If all of those turnovers, including the turnovers on downs, were turned into field goals, they would have 18 extra points. That would take them from being 11th with 23.3 pts per game to 3rd with 29.3 pts per game. 

Still, with no AJ Brown, no Lane Johnson, no DeVonta Smith, and no Mekhi Becton, this team moved the ball. A lot of that is Saquon Barkley, but Hurts, when he isn't turning it over, has moved the ball as well. This offense could be great, they can't keep making as many mistakes as they do though.

The joke continues. 3 weeks in, the number 0 on the back of Bryce Huff's jersey also represents his impact on the game. He has 0 sacks and 0 tackles. If you try to calculate how much he gets paid per tackle, you would not be able to. I put $17 million divided by 0 into the calculator on my phone, and it gave me an error message. Because by the basic rules of math, you can not divide by zero. Anything divided by 1 is itself. But zero is nothing. You cannot divide something by nothing. It doesn't even give you a number, you just get the word ERROR. 

Even worse for him, his snap count continues to dwindle. He played just 18 of the snaps, compared to 35 for Brandon Graham and 34 for Josh Sweat. He is a situational pass rusher, who can't rush the passer. It is still early, but it is looking like a disaster of a signing. He has clearly fallen out of favor with Vic Fangio, and with how bad he looks when on the field, can you blame Vic?

They can't keep asking a 36-year-old Brandon Graham to play 60% of the snaps. Huff, and Nolan Smith, ned to find a way to be productive.