Eagles-Cowboys takeaways: Jalen Hurts takes ownership, but Birds’ offensive plan lets him down

ARLINGTON, Texas — The Eagles’ efforts to stem the tide will drag on another week following a 33-13 loss to the Dallas Cowboys at AT&T Stadium on Sunday. They now find themselves in the thick of things both in the NFC East with Dallas and the race for the No. 1 seed.

Here’s what we learned from the second straight blowout loss:

After Sunday’s game, Jalen Hurts stood at the podium and took accountability for his role in the Eagles’ offensive struggles.

The Eagles quarterback had an uneven performance for a second week in a row, completing 18 of 27 passes for 197 yards but failing to produce a touchdown and coughing up a fumble on the team’s opening drive.

“Missed opportunities,” Hurts said when asked what left him most frustrated after the loss. “Taking advantage of our opportunities. We talk about executing every week and how important that is. I feel like we put ourselves in good position to get into that high red-zone area many times, and we turned the ball over when we got there. I have to do a better job of protecting the ball and creating that energy for us. I’ve just got to do better with that.”

» READ MORE: Josh Sweat voices Eagles’ defensive frustration after another woeful effort from Sean Desai’s unit

Hurts’ play was far from stellar, but his mistakes alone did not bury the Eagles offense at Jerry World. The game plan left plenty to be desired, with the offense once again relying too heavily on the best players making up the margins with moments of excellence rather than staying ahead of a defense schematically.

Teams have changed the way they defend the Eagles. They’re facing more two-high safety shells to take away Hurts’ access to A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith streaking down the sideline. The run game hasn’t made teams pay for doing so and the answers in the passing game have not been apparent.

For most of this season, the offense has been predicated on hunting one-on-one matchups for Brown and Smith and relying on them to win those matchups. When all else fails, Hurts’ ability to create out of a scramble drill behind an elite offensive line affording him the time to do so covers up the fact that the offense has been out of sync for some time now.

Case in point: Only Brown, Smith, and tight end Dallas Goedert were targeted by Hurts the entire game. The offense has lost its rhythm, and there’s only so much the talent across the group can make up for.

» READ MORE: ‘Hungry Dogs’ dominated by Dallas as undisciplined Eagles fly back to Philly, their tails between their legs

“When you think about, ‘Why isn’t something operating in the fashion that maybe we expect it to?’ — it’s just all about controlling the things that we can,” Hurts said. ... “This is something that we’re going through, not necessarily something we’re stuck in. We have to be able to learn from it and we will.”

Watching Dallas move star receiver CeeDee Lamb around the formation to create favorable matchups against slot cornerbacks, linebackers, and safeties, it was hard not to wonder about the static nature of the Eagles offense.

The Eagles’ lack of movement, particularly at the snap, has been a trend since Nick Sirianni arrived in 2021. What’s interesting is that Indianapolis Colts coach Shane Steichen, the Eagles’ offensive coordinator last season, uses motion at the snap 22% of the time in his new post, which ranks 11th in the league compared to the Eagles, who rank 32nd.

Earlier this season, Sirianni said the lack of motion is tied to his belief that it should only be utilized with an express purpose.

“My philosophy is we don’t want to just motion to motion,” Sirianni said. “We want to motion to create advantages or pick something up or mesh something together.”

It’s a sentiment that offensive coordinator Brian Johnson has echoed and something Steichen said during his tenure running the offense in 2021 as well. Obviously teams like the San Francisco 49ers or Los Angeles Rams don’t purposelessly send players in motion, though. Rams receiver Cooper Kupp and Minnesota Vikings receiver Justin Jefferson have each found elite production as the focal point of a motion-heavy system that puts defenses in binds with movement at the snap.

» READ MORE: Fumble-itis spreads to A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, dooming the Eagles’ comeback chances at Dallas

It’s also important to remember Smith’s success in a motion-heavy scheme run by Steve Sarkisian, the offensive coordinator when he was at Alabama.

There are drawbacks to pre-snap motion, of course. Some quarterbacks, including Peyton Manning, preferred things to stay static at the line of scrimmage. Moving players can also make the offensive line’s job more difficult, especially when determining which defender to leave unblocked in a run-pass option.

That said, I wrote last week that the Eagles’ offense needs to evolve. Developing more of a plan with pre-snap motion could certainly be part of that evolution.

Moving on from the offensive concerns, it’s time to zoom out for some perspective.

The Eagles are still in an enviable spot with four games to play. They have the easiest strength of schedule remaining among the contenders. They can control their own destiny in the division with a road game coming up against the Seattle Seahawks followed by two games against the New York Giants and a home matchup against the Arizona Cardinals sandwiched in between.

They’ll need some help from the 49ers to reclaim their hold on the NFC’s No. 1 seed, but San Francisco’s Christmas game against the Baltimore Ravens could give them an opportunity to leapfrog the Niners.

» READ MORE: Another embarrassing effort shows the Eagles need a shake-up. It’s on Nick Sirianni to provide it.

The Eagles went 3-2 in a five-game gauntlet, which matches most reasonable expectations going into it. The manner in which they’ve lost the last two games leaves lingering questions about whether this team can reach its ultimate goal, but there is enough talent on this roster to give the team a puncher’s chance against anyone.

The Eagles have certainly overperformed their underlying metrics all year and it’s starting to catch up to them. They’re 11th in point differential (plus-21), 23rd in turnover differential (minus-4), and eighth in defense-adjusted value over average, which calculates a team’s success based on the down and distance of every play during the season.

Even ignoring the metrics, the Eagles haven’t played a complete game in quite some time and are regressing on both sides of the ball right when teams hope to start playing their best football. Also, the loss to the Cowboys showed that the defense’s recent struggles aren’t exclusive to the 49ers and the matchup nightmare they present.

The Monday night road game against the Seahawks will be an important test of the Eagles’ resolve to get things fixed, but the lingering sting of the last two weeks will make potential playoff rematches against the Cowboys or 49ers loom large.

Perhaps the Eagles can flip a switch. Or, perhaps the play we’ve seen from them through 14 weeks is simply who they are.

A brief word about the Eagles’ fourth-and-8 call in the third quarter that gained 1 yard.

Trailing by two touchdowns, the Eagles had to have it, and the play call left plenty to be desired. You’ll hear coaches say there are no good calls for fourth-and-8, but the Eagles called a slow-developing mesh concept expecting man coverage from the Cowboys, who blitzed Hurts on 10 of his 28 dropbacks Sunday.

The Cowboys sent six rushers on the play, collapsing the pocket and forcing Hurts into a quicker throw than the call required, targeting Smith on his shallow crossing route well short of the sticks. Poor timing perhaps, but it’s fair to point out that Cowboys defensive coordinator Dan Quinn was ahead of the Eagles’ offensive staff in one of the highest-leverage downs of the game.

» READ MORE: Eagles are sizable road favorites against the Seahawks on Monday night

“We had a play on that we feel pretty good against the different man-to-man types of defenses that we go against,” Sirianni said. “This case, it didn’t work.”

“You saw what we did, we threw it short, tried to get a catch-and-run,” Sirianni added later. “As you’ve seen, a lot of our situations in games, we’ve hit that and got a catch-and-run. In this case, we didn’t get as many yards. They did a good job defending it.”