Haason Reddick dominated the Bears and helped save the Eagles from a humiliating loss

CHICAGO — Haason Reddick’s extremities were still thawing out late Sunday afternoon minutes after the Eagles’ 25-20 victory over the Bears, after three hours of football in the kind of weather that compels a mountain man to cut open his horse and climb inside. But inside the visiting locker room here at Soldier Field, Reddick’s mouth was hot and humming.

He has a bone to pick with the National Football League’s statisticians. Tackles. Sacks. What the hell?

“They take a solo tackle and an assisted tackle, but the assisted tackle don’t count as half a tackle,” he said. “It counts as a whole tackle. I don’t understand why they don’t do the same thing with sacks. Shouldn’t be half a sack. Should be a full. Intentional grounding should be a sack. A flag on the play should be a sack. Think about all these things. … There’s no such thing as a half-tackle. Why would there be a half-sack?”

Good question. Reddick officially has 12 sacks this season, and even by the conventional definition of the term, he could have had at least two more Sunday had Bears quarterback Justin Fields, who rushed for 95 yards in the game, not broken away from him. “Man, what a competitor,” Reddick said.

But he made up for failing to corral Fields on those two plays with his best and most dominating performance as an Eagle, catching and sacking Fields twice, recording a tackle for a loss, forcing a fumble, and defending a pass. In a classic “trap game” for the Eagles against an inferior opponent, Reddick was as important on his side of the ball as A.J. Brown was on his, Howie Roseman’s two most important and expensive springtime acquisitions saving the Eagles from what would have been a humiliating loss to a three-win team. Half-sack, no sack, whatever — Reddick was everywhere. If he had been wearing an Apple watch, the pedometer app would have started smoking.

» READ MORE: The Eagles are great. They’re also incredibly boring. Here are few ways to make them more exciting.

It’s his identity as a great pass-rusher, though, that matters most to Reddick. It’s the sacks that matter to him. He had 12½ sacks with the Arizona Cardinals in 2020, then 11 last season with the Carolina Panthers, and after a similarly busy game last week against the Giants — a sack, a quarterback hit, a tackle for a loss — he had lamented, “When they talk about the best edge rushers, they always leave me out of the mix.”

Harder for them to do that now, after Sunday.

“I’ve been doing this thing for three years now,” he said. “I’m back-to-back-to-back, with different teams. To properly word it, I’m not taking away from nobody’s scheme, nothing like that. But at the end of the day, a scheme can’t help me fall into 10 sacks.”

That was the relative chance that Roseman and the Eagles took in the offseason — that those high sack totals for a 6-foot-1, 240-pound linebacker couldn’t be the product of any defensive system, because Reddick had played in so many systems — when they signed him to a three-year free-agent contract worth as much as $45 million. For Reddick, accepting a fair offer from the Eagles was no choice at all. A Camden native, a Temple alumnus, he stopped listening to any offers or pitches from other teams once he learned that the Eagles were interested in him. “Coming home,” he said, “that was always a dream.”

If he had any trepidation about playing for defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon, whose reluctance last season to have the Eagles blitz was considered in some quarters an excessively passive and damaging approach, it vanished quickly. Reddick likes that Gannon empowers his players by soliciting and accepting feedback from them; he did it Sunday. “He’s coming on the sideline: ‘What do you all want me to call? Is there anything I should call? What are you all feeling?’” Reddick said. “And that’s a great feeling to have, where your DC has so much trust in his guys. ‘What you all want? Y’all eating? Y’all playing? Y’all balling? What do you guys want to do?’”

As for Gannon’s alleged lack of aggressiveness in his play-calling, his defense does sometimes call for Reddick, the unit’s strong-side or SAM linebacker, to fall back into pass coverage. It seems a waste of his primary skill, doesn’t it? Not to Reddick.

» READ MORE: Eagles’ A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith feed off each other’s energy

“Everybody has to understand that for a scheme like this to work, you have to have a SAM linebacker who can drop,” he said. “We have to do it for them not to know what I’m doing. I can’t be out there not dropping at all. It won’t work like that. They look at me to get a read. Is he dropping? Is he coming? What is he doing? It just so happens that I’m good at rushing.”

He’s not the only one. Javon Hargrave has 10 sacks. Josh Sweat has 9½. Brandon Graham has 8½. It’s possible that the Eagles will become the first team in NFL history to have four players with double-digit sacks in the same season. They have 55. The team’s 16-game record is 62, set in 1989, but Reddick didn’t know that. Jeremiah Washburn, the Eagles’ defensive ends/outside linebackers coach, hasn’t revealed the figure to his players, presumably because he doesn’t want them preoccupied with breaking the record. To Reddick, there’s a deeper motivation anyway.

“I want to be the best, and that’s what drives me,” he said. “We’re just gonna keep running.”

It was all he did Sunday, a day when the Eagles needed every step.