Reed Blankenship and the Eagles secondary leave the Commanders game unsatisfied, but ‘a win is a win’

LANDOVER, Md. — For a moment, it seemed as if Reed Blankenship had forgotten about his pivotal play.

The Eagles safety shot a quizzical look to a cluster of reporters and cameras waiting to interview him after his team’s 38-31 win over the Washington Commanders on Sunday, uncertain if they’d meant to grab someone else.

“Me?”

Yes, Blankenship.

About an hour earlier, the second-year defensive back read Washington quarterback Sam Howell’s eyes and was in the right spot when his pass sailed over Terry McLaurin’s outstretched hands and into Blankenship’s. It was a timely stop for a defense struggling to find one, even against a Washington offense that ranked 27th in defense-adjusted value over average going into the game.

Still, Blankenship said the plays he didn’t make were more front of mind after the game.

“I take this game kind of personal,” Blankenship said. “I didn’t get a lot of my job done today, but at the end of the day, you have to fix your mistakes — a win is a win. I believed in everybody else around me on offense and defense, we got the job done, so that’s all that matters.

“It’s one of those plays that brings back a little confidence. But at the end of the day, I think about my mistakes more than anything else.”

Similar to the first meeting between the two teams, Washington had an uncharacteristically productive day against the Eagles defense, which eventually bore down when it mattered most. Howell finished 39-of-52 for 397 yards, four touchdowns, and the critical interception, which served as the catalyst for the Eagles’ first lead of the game.

Last week’s performance against the No. 1-ranked Miami Dolphins offense suggested the defense could be on the upswing, but Washington offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy’s plan to get the ball out of Howell’s hands quickly and exploit pre-snap tells from the Eagles defense gave the group fits for most of the afternoon. Howell came into the game the most-sacked quarterback in the league, but it took the Eagles 3½ quarters to record a sack.

Howell got off to a hot start against the Eagles’ zone coverages, completing 19 of his first 20 passes. According to Next Gen Stats, he averaged 2.52 seconds to throw, about a quarter of a second quicker than his season average. If not for two untimely drops from McLaurin on third and fourth down late in the game, things could have been even more bleak for the Eagles defense.

Although the win serves as a consolation, several of the Eagles defensive backs conceded there was only so much enjoyment they could take given the way they performed.

“We’ve got a lot of corrections to make,” Eagles cornerback Darius Slay said. “Definitely the back seven, we’ve got to get all kinds of stuff fixed up because [stuff] like that shouldn’t be going on.”

After joining the team in a trade last Monday, veteran safety Kevin Byard said there would be a sobering film session to dissect what went wrong for the secondary at FedEx Field. The former Tennessee Titans All-Pro may be less than a week into his Eagles tenure, but he wasn’t shy in assessing his performance.

“We’re professional football players, we’re supposed to make the hard look easy,” said Byard, who played the majority of the snaps. “Just because I came here on a Tuesday and practiced the next day doesn’t make me exempt from not going out there and putting out a good product.

“I’m not exempt from any of this. But that’s one thing that we’re going to make sure — we’re going to watch the film on Monday, we’re going to be very critical of ourselves, we’re going to keep it 100 in the room and say that this is not good enough. That’s the only way that you can get better. You have to be real with yourself and watch the film.”

The Eagles got caught in unfavorable coverage looks on multiple occasions, including one in which Sydney Brown got out-leveraged by Jahan Dotson for a 21-yard touchdown as Blankenship rotated down and out of the play. Other times players just lost their one-on-one matchups, like on McLaurin’s 26-yard touchdown in the first quarter, baiting James Bradberry with a stutter move before getting past him.

“It was little detail things that turned into big plays,” Bradberry said. “My touchdown shouldn’t have happened. I was trying to be aggressive on the short route when the route wasn’t even there. I should have been more disciplined with my eyes.”

The Eagles eventually shifted to a heavy dose of man coverage looks and made more of an effort to disguise their calls pre-snap. Howell was often methodical at the line of scrimmage, letting the play clock get down to single digits while diagnosing what the Eagles were in.

The shift to man wasn’t always effective — Blankenship got beaten by Washington tight end Logan Thomas for a 7-yard touchdown in man coverage and the Commanders found success complicating things with bunch sets after the shift.

Still, Blankenship’s interception and the two forced turnovers on downs that followed it flashed what the secondary is capable of, so long as it finds some consistency.

“We know who we are and what we can be,” Blankenship said. “So that’s what kind of makes us mad, but at the end of the day, a win is a win.”