Saquon Barkley’s touches, Nick Sirianni’s job security, and more answers to Reddit’s biggest Eagles questions

After each Eagles game this season, Inquirer columnist David Murphy will answer questions posed by Eagles fans on Reddit about what they saw on the field — and what it means moving forward — in a weekly mailbag of sorts.

As the team heads into the bye week, there seem to be even more questions after the Eagles suffered a beating at the hands of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Here are some of the best questions we received this week …

Murphy: It’s a great question. I think we can narrow it down even further to the first quarter vs. the rest of the game. The splits are pretty dramatic. Saquon has touched the ball 11 times in the first quarter in four games. That’s remarkably low, especially when you look at his touches the rest of the game …

Just seems absurd. Partly to blame: the Eagles have only run 42 plays in the first quarter …

Total offensive plays/run/pass

So Barkley has touched the ball one of every four plays in the first quarter, and roughly the same in the second. But in the third quarter he has touched the ball basically every other play, and one every three plays in the fourth quarter.

» READ MORE: Eagles react to Devin White’s controversial retweet: ‘I know that today he felt silly’

So what’s going on? One, Kellen Moore is a classic new-school offensive coordinator who believes in passing to set up the run, an approach that the data supports and is basically conventional wisdom at this point. Two, as you noted about Sunday, the Eagles have been less effective in the early stages of games, which leads to fewer offensive plays, which leads to fewer Saquon touches.

One thing I’ll say: I thought Moore would be more creative with the manner in which he gets the ball in Barkley’s hands, especially over the last few weeks with A.J. Brown and then DeVonta Smith out. I especially thought they’d use him out of the backfield as a receiver more creatively than they have. Barkley isn’t Christian McCaffrey, but is more complex a receiving threat than your classic dump-off running back. He has 12 catches through four games, five first downs. That’s a 52-catch pace. Respectable. It’s more about the inventiveness of the touches.

Anyway, to answer your question: I don’t know why the Eagles are limiting Barkley’s touches early, but they should perhaps not do that.

Murphy: Answer to follow. First, my counterquestion would be: What is the upside of firing Sirianni? Like, what are the Eagles actually going to gain? Heading into the season the whole bit on Sirianni was that he doesn’t actually have any responsibilities. So what problem is being fixed by getting rid of him?

To be clear I’m not disagreeing with the notion that the Eagles would be better off with a different head coach in the long run. But a team needs to make that decision in the offseason. The biggest mistake a team can make is deciding to give its head coach “one more chance.” It almost never works.

» READ MORE: Eagles’ Nick Sirianni says he’s not worried about his job status after loss to Buccaneers

This past offseason somebody mentioned to me that it worked with John Harbaugh and the Ravens at one point. I went back and looked and will concede the point, though Harbaugh had accrued vastly more political/organizational capital than most coaches “on the hot seat” — and certainly more than Sirianni.

Regardless, it’s the exception that proves the rule, whatever that means. My guiding principle is this: If a team can envision a scenario in which it would fire its coach midseason, it should just fire him before the season. You’re essentially just wasting a season, and potentially more.

I only see downsides to firing a coach. There are only bad outcomes. Most times, a team gets a slight bump for a week or two but ends up just as bad as it was. Basically all you gain is lowering your draft pick with a spirit win or two in the wake of the firing. See Jeff Saturday and the Colts a couple of years ago. Then you have the Antonio Pierce scenario, where your team performs well enough that you feel obligated to bring back the interim coach, thereby costing yourself the chance for legitimate wholesale change.

As for where Lurie’s head is at, my sense is that Sirianni would need to completely lose the locker room for the Eagles to fire him this early in the season. Nothing I’ve seen or heard suggests that is close to happening.

» READ MORE: C.J. Gardner-Johnson’s trash talk failed in Tampa. Darius Slay wants him to keep going, even if it’s ‘stupid.’

Murphy: When Todd Bowles took the reins of the defense.

Murphy: At the end of the day, the quarterback is the only one in a position to react in real time to what he is seeing in front of him. The thing that made Brady and Manning so great is that they could see what the defense was going to do pre-snap and they had a pretty good idea where they were going with the ball by the time they got it in their hands.

That’s a rare ability. After that, it’s up to the coaches to prep and teach. Unless a team has a better option at quarterback, it is on the coaches to make it work.

Murphy: Personally, I think Hurts is who he is. He needs a team with a good defense.

Murphy: Personnel. The best defenses are drafted and developed. The Eagles haven’t done that.

» READ MORE: Bad playing, bad coaching, and what comes next: Eagles DC Vic Fangio assesses damage from Sunday’s loss

Murphy: All of the above, plus missing their All-Pro right tackle.

Murphy: I think he is regressing to the mean, if that makes sense. The mean is still plenty good enough with the right team around him. Maybe there is a better scheme for him and a coach out there who can identify it. You can win with him if you play good defense and don’t ask him to win the game by himself. They just aren’t that team right now.