Birds Blow It Again: Eagles Squander Fourth-Quarter Lead, Fall Back to .500

PHILADELPHIA — There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over this region on a Monday morning after the Eagles give one away. You hear it at the Wawa counter in Camden, in the car line outside the grade schools in Pennsauken, on the PATCO platform at Broadway. It’s the quiet of a fan base that has seen enough football to know the difference between losing and collapsing. Sunday was a collapse.

The Eagles led the Los Angeles Rams 20-10 with the fourth quarter winding down. They did not score again. The Rams did — fourteen points in the final four minutes — and walked out of Lincoln Financial Field with a 24-20 win that dropped Philadelphia to 2-2 and left this town asking a question it did not expect to be asking in early October: what, exactly, is this offense?

It’s the quiet of a fan base that has seen enough football to know the difference between losing and collapsing.Samuel Banks

Zero for twelve

Because what we watched in the second half was not NFL football. The Eagles went 0-for-12 on third down. Zero for twelve. That is the worst third-down day on record for a franchise that has been playing games since 1933. They finished with 172 total yards, 3.0 yards a play, ninety-three passing yards. After halftime, Jalen Hurts completed two of nine passes for ten yards. Ten. I’ve seen high school offenses in Gloucester County move the ball better on a wet Friday night.

Now, I’m not here to bury Hurts, because the truth is more complicated than a stat line, and I was raised to tell you the truth. By the end of Sunday, Hurts was running an offense held together with tape. Saquon Barkley pulled up with a hamstring in the first quarter and didn’t come back. Dallas Goedert was already out. DeVonta Smith was inactive. So was Lane Johnson, the best right tackle of his generation, which meant the Rams spent the fourth quarter sending blitzers at a quarterback with no back to hand to, no tight end to find, and a patched-together line in front of him. Los Angeles knew it. They brought pressure, sacked Hurts four times, and hurried him into the ground.

Here’s what should scare you if you love this team: the Eagles have been outscored 31-0 in the second half of their last two games. That’s not an injury problem. That’s a halftime problem. Good teams make adjustments in the locker room. This team, four games in, keeps coming out of the tunnel looking like it left the game plan in there.

Birds worth cheering

There were Birds worth cheering. Darius Cooper, a second-year wideout who came into the league undrafted, caught two touchdowns, including a circus grab in the second quarter, on a ball that was nearly intercepted, that he reeled in like he’d been doing it his whole life. Jeremiah Trotter Jr. — son of the linebacker whose name still echoes in this stadium — piled up 15 tackles, though he’ll lie awake over the tackle he missed on the game-winning score. And the defense finally took the ball away, two interceptions off Matthew Stafford, from Drew Mukuba and Cooper DeJean, the first takeaways this unit had managed all year.

But takeaways don’t matter when your offense can’t hold a ten-point lead for four minutes. The Rams are a veteran team with a quarterback headed for the Hall of Fame, and they did what veteran teams do: they waited for you to flinch, then they took it.

So here we are. Two and two. South Jersey doesn’t panic over its football team — we’ve buried too many seasons to flinch at one October loss. But we notice. We always notice. And what we noticed Sunday is a team with championship talent playing thirty minutes of championship football and thirty minutes of something that gets coaches fired.

Get Barkley healthy. Get Johnson back. Find out what’s happening between the ears at halftime. Because the schedule does not care that the trainer’s room is full, and come January, neither will anybody else.

Based on reporting from ESPN, NBC Sports Philadelphia, Yahoo Sports, and The Philadelphia Eagles.