It doesn’t get much weirder than last night’s Eagles-Cowboys game at Lincoln Financial Field.
For the diehards who stayed up until well past midnight ET, the NFL’s first game of the season will officially go down as one of its strangest of the season.
The Birds’ best defensive player was kicked out of the game before playing a single snap after a spitting duel with Dallas QB Dak Prescott. Both offenses were unstoppable through the first half, with neither team punting once. Following halftime, thunderstorms moved through South Philadelphia, causing a baseball-like weather delay of just over an hour, forcing the players into the locker room and fans to crowd the concourse. Upon the resumption of play, the defenses dominated, ultimately leading to a 24-20 Eagles victory to open their title defense season.
Week 1 is always a bit unpredictable. Teams are playing their starters less than ever in the preseason nowadays, so for just about everyone on the field, last night was the first time they played a complete football game in nine months.
More penalties are committed in the first week as players reacclimate themselves to the rigors of an NFL game. Fatigue sets in, which leads to poor form and mistakes. You simply can’t simulate regular season action in summertime joint practices, or even the preseason. Taunting penalties are more understandable in the first week, as the jawing that doesn’t get penalized in practices is carried over to the field. Discipline must be instilled, and new players are still learning how they fit into offensive and defensive schemes.
The Eagles have their fourth offensive coordinator in four years, now Kevin Patullo, calling the plays. On the whole, there are reasons to be optimistic by what we saw on Thursday night. The defense lost a number of high profile players during the off-season, with young guys now getting their first opportunity at real playing time. Last night, that same defense lost Jalen Carter unexpectedly after he was rightfully ejected for spitting on Prescott.
And yet, the Eagles overcame, like they always seem to do under Jalen Hurts. Hurts is that rare breed of athlete who doesn’t care what the statistics say or what’s next to his name in the box score. He just does what’s needed in that moment to win. Last night, Dallas’ defense decided to allow Hurts to use his legs to beat them, and he did, scoring two touchdowns on a team-best 62 yards rushing. It was the 15th straight game Hurts has won that he started and finished, dating back to Week 6 last year.
Some other weird stuff happened, too.
A.J. Brown didn’t receive a single target until just under two minutes left, hauling in a crucial 8-yard reception to set up the clinching 3rd-and-2 Hurts first down scramble. Was Patullo’s game plan too vanilla, failing to get his star wide receiver some manufactured touches, or was Hurts simply taking what the defense gave him? Of Hurts’ 19 completions, only one went for more than nine yards, and that was a 51-yard bomb to Jahan Dotson. No completions between 10 and 50 yards for Hurts. That’s weird.
It was also weird that after torturing Vic Fangio’s secondary for the better part of four quarters, Cee Dee Lamb suffered two crucial drops after the rain delay and was unable to haul in a difficult long pass down the left sideline on the Cowboys’ final possession. Sure, Lamb has a tendency to suffer from an occasional case of the dropsies, but they appeared at the worst possible time for them last night.
At the end of the day, the Eagles, as they often do, figured out a way to win. More importantly, a Cowboys victory over the defending Super Bowl champions would have been a feather in their cap and something to brag about for a full 10 days, perhaps planting the seed in their minds early that they can overtake the Eagles this season.
There’s obviously still plenty of time for that scenario to occur, and to their credit, Dallas played hard in a hostile environment under unusual circumstances. Maybe there is something for them to build on. But the Eagles didn’t allow them to start with a victory, and that’s huge, even in Week 1.
Remember that last season’s road to the Super Bowl featured a rocky first month. After beating the Packers in Brazil, the Eagles had a victory all but clinched on Monday Night against the Falcons, until a dropped pass by Saquon Barkley allowed Atlanta one more opportunity to march down the field and score the winning touchdown. They played their only truly awful game of the season in Week 4, a demoralizing loss in Tampa that had many questioning whether Nick Sirianni would finish out the season as head coach.
Early losses can be overcome, especially by a pedigree-rich team like the Eagles. Banking a win over the Cowboys can’t help but mentally make it feel like the Birds are a bit inevitable, kind of like the Chiefs have felt over the last seven years, and the Patriots before them.
There are items for the Eagles to work on and things to address. That’s to be expected after the season’s first game.
A weird first game, to be sure.
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