EAGLES
CHALK TALK

Boy, what a waste of time that was! I kept waiting for the Eagles to get off the bus and show up at Soldier Field but, aside from a solid second quarter, that never really took place. Sometimes it just isn't your night. Let's break things down a bit: THE REALLY BAD Launch the screen game into the sun already. Coming out of halftime trailing just 10-7 and carrying some momentum, my hope and expectation was that the Birds would keep things up on the offensive side, roll down an

THEY CAN'T KEEP WINNING LIKE THIS! THEY BARELY BEAT TWO BAD TEAMS! JALEN HURTS STINKS! THIS OFFENSIVE LINE STINKS NICK STINKS FANGIO HAS LOST IT THE SEASON IS OVER! Just felt like giving voice to the temper tantrums raging across portions of the fandom before we talk about the game like adults. Do we feel better now? Ready to get into it? Here are the major talking points as I see them: Philly perseveres in yet another close game to move to 2-0. There are quite a few teams th

Let's jump right into this; we'll play "Stock up, stock down": Stock up: Nick Sirianni's records in season openers and NFC East games. Nick has won all six season openers as the Eagles' coach. He's also won all five games after the bye since he's been here; clearly this staff does a good job with time to prepare. This win also run's Nick's record against the other NFC East teams to 22-11, including 9-3 against Washington. Stock down: the offensive line. Last year, the excuse

PREVIOUS 2026 PREVIEW ARTICLES The complete ranking of NFL QBs, 2026 edition Preseason power rankings; record projections; commentary. 2026 Roster Deep Dive, offensive edition. 2026 Roster Deep Dive, Defense / Special Teams Edition. Quick review: in 2022's version of this column I picked the Eagles to win 11 games (they won 14). In 2023 I had them down for 11 games again (they did indeed win 11). In 2024 I picked them to rack up 13 wins (they hit 14). Last year's prediction w

PREVIOUS 2026 PREVIEW ARTICLES The complete ranking of NFL QBs, 2026 edition Preseason power rankings; record projections; commentary. 2026 Roster Deep Dive, offensive edition. Let's take a look at the DST: Pass Rushers / EDGE players Ordinarily the long recovery time of a player as important as Jonathan Greenard would be a real cause for concern. I do worry that things are worse behind the scenes with his health than we've been told, but the plan is still for him to return s

PREVIOUS 2026 PREVIEW ARTICLES The complete ranking of NFL QBs, 2026 edition Preseason power rankings; record projections; commentary. A semi-detailed look at the offensive side of the Eagles roster; for the purposes of this exercise I'm including practice squad guys as the line between the 53 man roster and the practice squad (PS) has become all the more thin in the COVID era. PS guys will be notated as such, as well as injured reserve (IR). Here goes nothing: Quarterbacks W

PREVIOUS 2026 PREVIEW ARTICLES The complete ranking of NFL QBs, 2026 edition Let's get into it! I ran out of time to do a review of last year's predictions; feel free to CLICK HERE to review those if you want. Some picks were good, some... weren't. We're going to count up from 32; I'll include my prediction for that team's final record. You'll note that the list isn't necessarily sorted by the projected record; naturally a team's strength of schedule can inflate (or deflate)

This is usually one of my favorite columns to write, mostly because of the (often faulty) narratives surrounding the quarterback position. So many internal biases go into these sorts of rankings (including my own), so I figured that one more opinion piece can't hurt. Unlike some, I'm going to take my lumps for past misses on these rankings; if a player was ranked in the four previous (2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025) versions of this column, that ranking will be presented so you can

QB accuracy has many definitions across the NFL and what people use to define it will vary greatly. Myself, I took a couple of measurments from the good people at stathead.com to see if I could find a meaningful yet simple metric. I looked at three of their advanced stats: On Target Throw % (pretty simple to grasp, the percentage of times a QB hits his target), Good Throw % (basically, the percentage of throws that aren't Bad Throws by their definition) and Intended Air Yards

A few days ago we asked the question, "Who is Jalen Hurts?". In that piece I briefly mentioned a metric that I called "comeback success rate" that attempted to compare the number of times a QB had led his team to a 4th quarter comeback (or had led his team on a game winning drive) to the number of opportunities that this player had to do this. This was done by adding the number of comebacks attributed to the QB to the number of losses to estimate how often the player was trai

It's that time of year again! Are you a true football nerd? Do the tiny yet vital details of the sport fascinate you? If so, then this piece is for you! A couple years ago I developed a bulletproof and ingenious methodology to rank all the active long snappers in the NFL (credit where credit is due, I was inspired and built the system on the shoulders of this guy). For this analysis, I only included active long snappers who have appeared in an NFL game (this is why you'll not

We've seen the headlines by now: "ESPN experts rank Jalen Hurts 17th"; "Hurts falls again in annual QB Tiers rankings", so forth and so on. The league's thinking on Jalen seems to have settled on an almost insulting "middle of the road, probably not even average" consensus that I just don't understand and will unpack. First off, just how is Jalen viewed? There have been three major consensus rankings that I've looked at this summer (the now-famous ESPN ranking of journalists,

Four seasons ago, I worked up a new quarterback statistic, based on Pro Football Reference's excellent ANY/A metric, and used that statistical analysis to model how good Jalen Hurts would be for the 2022 season. This model correctly predicted an All Pro type of season from Hurts, which came to pass. Here's a link to the original post, but the following is the formula for the subsequently updated version of the statistic (I will intend to reference this somewhat often over the

Ah, Terrell Eldorado Owens. The great hope of the longsuffering Eagles fans who arrived by trade in time for the 2004 season. He was finally going to solve years of mediocre to terrible WR play (seriously, check out this list of stiffs that Birds fans endured in the early years of the Andy Reid era). Owens had proven himself to be a premier playmaker in San Francisco and after increasing dissatisfaction there, forced his way to Philadelphia to team with Donovan McNabb. Firewo

Usually I come out with this article sometime shortly after the draft but one of the reasons I waited was to see how the AJ Brown situation got resolved. Well, that's been done for some time now, so let's get to it. With camp about three weeks away, let's jump right in with some grades and commentary for the offseason's biggest storylines (starting with the bad news): Lost Jeff Stoutland due to philosophical differences over offensive system: F - - -. It's really difficult to

CLICK HERE if you're interested in reading the "What went wrong?" version of this column. Losing an embarrassing playoff game in the wake of a frustrating season is no way to defend your Super Bowl championship, but no matter how bitter the taste of last season might be, there were plenty of positives, some of which set Philly up pretty well for the future: Philly won 11 games despite a brutal schedule. A quick review of the Eagles' schedule reveals "only" six games against e

Well, it wasn't what we had hoped: the Eagles' attempt to be just the fourth team in the salary cap era to repeat as champions went up in smoke. Back in January, I didn't want to waste time talking about that 49ers game (you all saw what I saw), but no one who watched that team could have been too shocked by what happened: the offense again went ice cold for too long, aided by untimely dropped passes and foolish penalties. It's the same script from September, October, Novemb

Three years ago, in anticipation of a Philly Super Bowl run, I wrote a piece that attempted to use statistical history to determine the mold that champions typically come from. I ended up finding seven statistical traits that seemed to predict success with some frequency. Last year I came back to that project and updated it a bit with a couple new and different insights (that article came to the conclusion that Philly was a serious threat to win the big game, and well, tha

Another year, another insane Eagles-Bills game ! This one was defensive in nature, helped by the miserable Buffalo weather, and like that matchup from two years ago went down to the final play. Much has been made about Philly's offense going completely stagnant for the second half (which it did, frustratingly), but to that I'll offer a nominal defense: the weather was terrible, the Bills offense had been totally strangled by the Eagles' D (until late in the third quarter the

What were you doing on November 28, 2004? I was wrapping up my first semester in college, which feels like a lifetime ago. That date happened to be when the Eagles clinched their fourth consecutive NFC East title. The Birds had ruled the division for much of the decade and were in the midst of a Super Bowl run. It was hard to imagine that reign ever ending, and yet that would remarkably be the start of the longest run of nonconsecutive division champs in NFL history. That's a