The Eagles are flirting with dysfunction. Nick Sirianni needs to remind his team what makes it great.

It’s beginning to look a lot like panic for the Eagles. Monday’s game in Seattle was going to be an inflection point regardless of who was calling the defensive plays or playing cornerback. Now, with the loss of Darius Slay to knee surgery, the Eagles have demoted defensive coordinator Sean Desai.

It is a stunning, near-unprecedented turn of events for a 10-3 team that still has a good chance at finishing the regular season as the NFC’s top playoff seed. For the first time in Nick Sirianni’s tenure, there is a whiff of dysfunction in the air. The Dom DiSandro ejection, the blowout losses to their most serious foes, the Desai demotion. This may be little more than a rough patch for the Eagles. But it’s a bad-looking one. And looks have a way of manifesting themselves.

We are going to learn a lot about Sirianni against the Seahawks on Monday. His team will tell us all we need to know. A coach has only so many bullets. When you fire, you’d better be right. Matt Patricia is an excellent tactician, far better than his reputation suggests. But this is a move that you can make only once.

Sirianni needs to send a message to his team. To his coaches. To his opponents. He needs them to relay that message to the broader public. Monday night is their platform.

We’re still here.

It’s funny. As good a coach as Sirianni has shown himself to be, the only way out of this pickle is to take the advice of two random dudes holding a poster board sign on a city street at the crack of dawn.

Run the ball.

The defense needs it. The quarterback needs it. The offensive coordinator needs to realize that he needs it.

The Eagles are looking like a team that is the exact opposite of the team it has been for two straight years. In moments like this, the best thing to do is get back to basics. Do the things you did when you were at your best. For the Eagles, that means leaning on an offensive line that is at its best when it is playing downhill. It means returning to the team it was for most of last season.

Keep it simple. Impose your will. Show everyone why they should take a deep breath and settle down.

Lane Johnson. Jason Kelce. Jordan Mailata.

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The Eagles are at a point that is a lot like the one they encountered in Week 2 against the Vikings. Down 7-3, tripping over themselves, they ran the ball on 12 of the next 15 plays. Inside zone. Inside zone. Again, again, and again.

It had a calming influence. This was a restorative moment. It’s exactly the moment they now need.

Remember, Jalen Hurts didn’t become a superstar because he could drop back 40 times and pick apart a defense. He was the pilot of a road grader. A year ago, the Eagles entered Week 15 running the ball 33 times per game while throwing it 30. True, some of that balance was situational in nature, a result of blowout game scripts. Hurts’ own rushing volume played a role as well. Yet, fact is, Eagles running backs are averaging nearly two fewer carries and one fewer first down per game than they did last year.

D’Andre Swift ranks 11th in the league in first-down carries despite having a better yard-per-carry-average than eight of the 10 backs with more volume. The Eagles rank 19th in the league in second-down carries despite ranking 11th in average yard-to-gain (per Pro-Football-Reference.com). Over Hurts’ first three seasons as an NFL starter, the Eagles’ rush percentage has fallen from .512 to .484 to .455 this season.

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The progression is normal. Inevitable, even. When you have a quarterback who is coming off a season like Hurts had in 2022, the natural reaction is to ask him to do even more. The Chargers did it with Justin Herbert, their run percentage dropping from .413 to .375 after their quarterback’s brilliant rookie campaign in 2020. The Bengals did it with Joe Burrow, boosting his pass attempts from 32 per game in 2021 to 38 per game in 2022. Makes total sense. You put the ball in the hands of your best player. The logic is pretty much universal in sports. But it can be something of a trap.

Eagles fans needn’t look too far back to remember what can happen when a team becomes overly reliant on a supremely talented young quarterback. Back in 2017, Carson Wentz was every bit the impact player that Hurts was in 2022. That’s easy to forget, given the way things went after Wentz shredded his knee against the Rams as the playoffs loomed. The guy accounted for 188 of the Eagles’ 308 first downs during his 13 healthy weeks, a 61% share that was higher than even Tom Brady’s in New England. He threw for 17 first downs on third-and-10+ or fourth-and-10+. He was a human highlight reel.

Yet the Eagles’ offensive scheme was incredibly well balanced early in Wentz’s tenure. In the first 11 weeks of 2017, they averaged 31.7 rush attempts against 32.5 pass attempts. Wentz had a stretch of eight straight games when he did not throw more than 31 passes. That year, the Eagles led the league with 20 runs of 20+ yards.

That balance faded over the rest of Wentz’s Eagles career. From 2018 on, he averaged 37 attempts per game, not including the remarkable three sacks per game that he took. In 2017, the Eagles ran the ball on 44% of their plays. Over the next three seasons, that number was 39%.

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The point is that reliance on a quarterback can reach a point of diminishing returns. This is especially true when your defense isn’t winning the possession battle. Think back to Chip Kelly’s oversimplistic philosophy that more offensive plays are better. The faster an offense plays, the faster its defense is back on the field.

Whatever is wrong with this Eagles defense, however much of it was Desai’s fault, the best cure is on the other side of the line. Possess the ball. Impose your will. Get back to being who you are.

The Eagles will visit the Seattle Seahawks in a Monday Night Football showdown. Join Eagles beat reporters Olivia Reiner and EJ Smith as they dissect the hottest storylines surrounding the team on Gameday Central, live from Lumen Field in Seattle.