Four underrated Eagles questions, from Jalen Hurts’ scrambling to the schedule

As far as I’m concerned, the three holiest days on the Christian calendar are Easter, Christmas, and the day NFL rosters get cut to 53 and everyone can stop arguing about who the backup to the backup safety should be.

I used to love training camp. It still can be a lot of fun if you approach it the right way. I’m talking about those of us on the outside, watching from the sidelines without access to practice film and position meetings and install scripts. Football is a complicated game. The naked eye can only evaluate so much in real time. Plus, there is the nature of the thing itself. Training camp practices are subject to a couple of significant limiting factors: the lack of a truly live pass rush and the lack of an opponent who wears a different helmet and has game-planned to stop you. Both are rather important elements of sorting out wins and losses.

Like a lot of things in the present culture, training camp reached a point of oversaturation right around the time social media adoption reached a critical mass. Most of what you glean from training camp are snippets. Some of them turn out to be meaningful. Others are quickly proven to have been lacking in context to a comical degree. The context that matters is a real, live regular season. Before that happens, any reaction is overreaction. Social media excels at turning snippets into full-blown narratives. Preliminary thoughts become fundamental tenets of faith. Every summer I spend some time Googling training camp standouts from years past. To quote Jalen Hurts, people don’t know what they don’t know.

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And then it ends. The roster is trimmed. The real team is identified. Almost overnight, two months of storylines disappear into the ether. James Bradberry, Tyler Steen, Kenny Pickett, they are the real Boys of Summer. Now that autumn is upon us — unofficially at least — let’s reset our focus with four of the biggest questions the Eagles must answer.

Most of the talk this summer has centered on Hurts’ abilities as a pocket passer. Deservedly so. He took a step backward last season, a dramatic one when compared to the guy we saw pick apart the Chiefs in the Super Bowl. The interception rate more than doubled (1.3% to 2.6%). The completion rate ebbed, particularly in his last seven games (60.7%, down from 68.5% in the Eagles’ 9-1 start). But the biggest difference between Hurts 2022 and Hurts 2023 was more of a season-long thing. A lack of dynamism, of burst, of playground play-making in the open field.

I remember wondering in Week 1 whether Hurts had fully recovered from a short offseason that included ankle surgery. The thought lingered throughout the year.

Hurts’ scrambling ability is so singular and all-encompassing that it can be difficult to quantify. His ability to move and make people miss shows up as often in the passing game as it does when he actually crosses the line of scrimmage. Still, I’ve found three sets of numbers that illustrate my point. They are Hurts’ rushing stats on plays that were not obvious tush-push situations: with 2 or more yards to go for a first down.

An important piece of context is the number of passes he attempted in those situations in each season: 421 in 2021, 451 in 2022, 526 in 2023. Even beyond the raw decline was a more significant decline when you weight for the number of plays.

The most impactful unknown for the Eagles offense is whether Hurts can get back to the runner he was in his first two years as a starter. It’s more a cause for optimism than skepticism, given the possibility that it was mostly the result of some combination of health and circumstance.

For practically every team, the schedule is the most important and least discussed differentiator between success and failure. For the Eagles, the 2024 slate looks to be far more balanced than it was in 2022 or 2023. They have three of the tougher road games you’ll see: at the Bengals, at the Rams, and at the Ravens, along with a divisional road game in Dallas. Even in the best of times, you’d pencil in two or three likely losses, potentially four.

The defining characteristic of the schedule lies in the mid-tier of opponents, where they’ll need to contend with a host of teams that will enter 2024 with expectations far greater than their final 2023 records. On paper, the Falcons are a 7-10 team with the NFL’s 26th scoring offense. In reality, they have massively upgraded at quarterback while changing coaches. The Falcons seem to believe that Kirk Cousins was all their talent-laden offense was missing. We’ll find out in Week 2.

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Other opponents you (arguably) can qualify as teams on the rise: the Packers (Jordan Love’s second-half coming-out party), the Browns (5-1 in Deshaun Watson’s six starts), the Jaguars (underperformers by all accounts in 2023), and the Commanders (goodbye Sam Howell and Eric Bieniemy, hello Jayden Daniels and Kliff Kingsbury).

One of the side effects of the tear that the Eagles went on between Week 1 of 2022 and Week 11 of 2023 was that it warped our sense of what success looks like. Most years, 12-5 or 11-6 is all that a team can reasonably hope for. Even a Super Bowl team. Either mark would constitute a wildly successful and job-saving season for Nick Sirianni.

Barely a year and a half ago, smart football people were wondering whether Goedert would soon join the ranks of elite NFL tight ends. At least, that was one of the pre-Super Bowl narratives as the Eagles prepared to face Travis Kelce.

Goedert’s 17-game pace as a 27-year-old in 2022: 78 catches, 994 yards, four touchdowns.

His 17-game pace last season: 72 catches, 719 yards, four touchdowns.

In the meantime, the Eagles have added one of the NFL’s most capable pass-catching running backs and as talented a No. 3 receiver as they’ve had in recent years. One thing that hasn’t changed is Goedert’s talent.

» READ MORE: Saquon Barkley thinks the Eagles line will finally allow him to show his ‘true potential.’ Scary thought.

Howie Roseman deftly maneuvered himself out of a Haason Reddick blowup that easily could have submarined the season. The veteran edge rusher is somebody else’s problem now. That doesn’t change the fact that his skill set isn’t here. The Eagles hope they’ve replaced it with Bryce Huff. But they need to do more than replace it. Because the pass rush wasn’t good enough last year. Vic Fangio has earned the benefit of the doubt on that front. Still, it is the question that will determine much of the Eagles’ season.