Can’t stop the run, can’t win a Super Bowl. Vic Fangio needs to fix his worst-in-NFL unit. Fast.
Fangio's much-hyped defense has been off-the-charts bad up front. It cost the Eagles a loss against the Falcons, with more to come.
The Minnesota Vikings had the Purple People Eaters.
The Los Angeles Rams had the Fearsome Foursome.
The Eagles have the late-1990s Dow Jones Industrial Index.
Every time you look, it’s another double-digit gain.
Something needs to change, and it ain’t gonna be the Jimmies and the Joes.
Vic Fangio needs to scheme ’em up. He needs to coach ’em up. He needs to do it fast.
» READ MORE: Eagles grades: Jalen Hurts solid until his game-clinching interception, defensive line struggles vs. Falcons
The Eagles cannot win with a defense that makes first-down running plays look like third-and-25 draws. They cannot win with a defense that makes Tyler Allgeier look like Bijan Robinson and Bijan Robinson look like a black suit from The Matrix. They cannot win with a defense that allows 6.4 yards per carry.
The Eagles cannot win with this defense.
Not in its current state.
That was the story on Monday night. The Eagles did not lose to the Falcons because Saquon Barkley failed to make an easy game-ending catch. They didn’t lose because Jalen Hurts threw an interception with 27 seconds left. They didn’t even lose because of what happened in between: six plays in 65 seconds totaling 70 yards, all of them from the arm of a flat-footed quarterback who previously couldn’t find the strike zone.
All of it mattered in the end, no doubt. But, before it mattered, the Eagles first couldn’t stop the run.
They couldn’t stop it on the Falcons’ first scoring drive, when Allgeier’s 15-yard run moved them into field goal range early in the second quarter. They couldn’t stop it on their field goal drive in the closing minutes of the first half. when Robinson broke off back-to-back runs of 9 and 15 yards to move Atlanta into Eagles territory and added a 14-yard run to put the Falcons in the red zone. They couldn’t stop it after making some halftime adjustments: Atlanta rushed for 42 yards on the first drive of the third quarter, which resulted in another field goal.
“When I look at the film, we’re going to see what really happened … We saw that they were trying to attack us, cutting back, and stuff like that,” defensive end Brandon Graham said. “I felt like we started knowing as the game went, but I just know, we let this one slip. It stings, and it should. We let them boys come in here the first [home] game of the season, and we didn’t play our best ball.”
In that sense, Lincoln Financial Field looked a lot like Corinthians Arena in Brazil. That’s the troubling thing. The Eagles’ 22-21 loss to Atlanta in Week 2 looked disconcertingly similar to their 34-29 win over the Packers in Week 1. Five times, the Falcons gained at least 14 yards on a rushing attempt. The Packers did the same. That’s 10 total on the season. No other NFL team has allowed more than seven.
Somehow, in only two games, the Eagles have allowed four running backs to gain at least 40 yards on the ground. Robinson finished Monday night with 97 yards on 14 carries. Allgeier chipped in 53 on nine. In Week 1, Josh Jacobs gained 84 on 16, while someone named Emanuel Wilson gained 46 on four.
That’s untenable. A deal-breaker. If you can’t stop the run, you can’t stop anything in the NFL. The pass rush doesn’t matter. The coverage doesn’t matter. Shedding blocks, filling gaps, making tackles. Those are the fundamentals. They are the foundation.
“Sometimes, you have to earn the right to rush, meaning you have got to have them in passing situations,” Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said. “Didn’t seem like we had some passing situations today. They were in third-and-manageable or second-and-manageable. So sometimes you have to earn the right to rush. Like I said, when they were ahead of the sticks, that makes it a little bit harder on the pass rush.”
How do you fix it? That’s the big question. The hiring of Fangio was a production two years in the making. The Eagles made sure everyone knew he was the guy they would have wanted had they known Jonathan Gannon was going to leave for Arizona. The defense has been nothing short of a disaster thus far, the continuation of a hype-bust cycle where the coordinator who supposedly was the problem is replaced by a solution without an answer. As fate would have it, Matt Patricia was in attendance Monday night at Lincoln Financial Field in some sort of media capacity. Sean Desai was not available for comment. Gannon was celebrating a blowout win over the Rams.
Fangio? His track record precedes him. The preponderance of the evidence would suggest we begin to look at something other than scheme and coaching. On Monday, we heard the usual answer: got to look at the film.
“Obviously, it starts with our fundamentals and technique of how we get movement,” Sirianni said. “That’s where it’s always going to start. We can call whatever we want. It’s going to come down to our fundamentals. This is football. It doesn’t matter what level you’re at. It’s how you tackle, it’s how you defeat blocks, it’s how you pierce the line of scrimmage. And then we’ve got to be able to make sure we put them in positions to succeed. There are plenty of ways to do it. Sometimes with a five-down front. Sometimes it’s with the six-down front. Sometimes it’s with the pressure. Sometimes it’s with secondary pressure. Sometimes it’s with blitz zero. Sometimes it’s moving the front. I mean, yeah, we’ve got to do what we need to do to help put them in positions.
“It’s not just ever, ‘Hey, do this to stop this.’ That’s just not how football works. There are many different answers, and we’ve got to find the right answers and help put the guys in position and the guys got to make plays.”
But the guys are the guys. The players are who they are. Nolan Smith and Bryce Huff aren’t going to suddenly transform into prototypical edge-setters. Graham isn’t suddenly going to get younger. The linebackers aren’t going to suddenly gain years of experience.
Fangio has who he has. He has to make it work.