Eagles desperately need more from Bryce Huff, their biggest Week 1 bust since Ricky Watters

Dollar for dollar, has there ever been a worse debut by an Eagles player than Bryce Huff against the Packers on Friday night?

We may have to go all the way back to Ricky Watters in the “For Who, For What” game in 1995. That one was worse, right? Watters averaged 2.18 yards on 17 carries, lost a fumble, and alligator-armed a late-game catch in the Eagles’ 21-6 season-opening stinker of a loss to the Bucs. The veteran running back went on to have a darn good career in midnight green, but he still hasn’t lived down that first game.

You have to adjust the contract for inflation a little bit. Watters signed an offer sheet with the Eagles for three years and $6.9 million after the 49ers slapped him with the transition tag. That pales in comparison to the three-year, $51 million contract that Huff signed with the Eagles this offseason. But everything is relative. Keep in mind, back in 1995, Drew Bledsoe had just become the NFL’s highest-paid player at $6 million per year.

One thing is for sure: This is not a conversation you want to be having about a player who means so much to the Eagles’ chances in 2024. Huff wasn’t just bad against the Packers. He was invisible. No sacks. No hits. No hurries. Nothing.

Look, it was one game. A tough game. Week 1 is a notoriously poor predictor of future performance even when a team isn’t flying 10 hours and spending two nights in a foreign country before playing an ostensible home game in front of a non-home crowd in a soccer stadium. Anybody who wants a mulligan can have one. Joe Burrow is 1-4 with four touchdowns and five interceptions in Week 1 while playing on football fields in the United States. The two best quarterbacks during the 1 o’clock hour on Sunday were Josh Allen and Sam Darnold. You have to be careful when you formulate your opinions about Week 1. It mostly serves to confirm your priors.

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The unique thing about Huff is that there isn’t much on which to base your priors. When the Eagles signed him to that big contract, he’d averaged 26 snaps per game in 55 career games. He played fewer than 30 snaps in half of his games last season. We simply have not seen him be the thing that everyone assumed he was going to be when the Eagles tabbed him to replace Haason Reddick. Remember what Vic Fangio said when somebody asked him early in training camp whether Huff looked like a three-down player.

“Does he look like he can do it today? No,” the Eagles defensive coordinator said. “I do think eventually he will.”

Maybe we should have given more weight to that one key word.

Eventually.

There’s a chance that Fangio was using the word in a more open-ended sense than we assumed. The “eventually” he had in mind wasn’t “by the end of training camp” or “by the start of the regular season.” It was just … eventually. Eventually, Huff will have a full-time role in the Eagles defense. Maybe the onus wasn’t even supposed to be on Huff.

That’s the thing about Week 1. It’s the first chance for a coach like Fangio to figure out what he is working with. It’s his first chance to see how his players respond to the things he is asking them to do. Training camp can offer a general sense of talent levels and skill sets and knowledge of concepts. But the important part of football is how those things express themselves in an environment where an opposing coach is trying to counter the things that you are trying to do. Bill Belichick always used to say a coach doesn’t really know his team until midseason. We see the truth of it every year.

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Right now, all we can say for sure is that the Eagles need more out of Huff. Much more. If they do not get it, it is going to be a long year. The Eagles have a potential star in Quinyon Mitchell on one side of the field. On the other they have a soon-to-be 34-year-old veteran who looks like he has lost a step. Unlike Avonte Maddox, who has lost all of them. They can be a very good unit when paired with a very good edge rush. That wasn’t the case against the Packers. The dirty little secret of Week 1 is the amount of points Green Bay left on the board.

Huff isn’t entirely to blame. Nolan Smith was credited with a couple of hurries, but did little else of consequence. He is a player who still exists largely in theory. But, again, this isn’t about blame. It’s simply a statement of reality. The Eagles signed Huff to big money for a reason. They think he can do some things their defense desperately needs. His importance is commensurate with his price tag. Now, the performance needs to match.