The 2025 Philadelphia Eagles; what went wrong?

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, November and December played out when it really mattered.

In the spirit of my expose on the 2023 collapse, I offer the following discussion of what went wrong with the 2025 edition of Eagles football:

The defense regressed. Haha just kidding! More to come on this in the "What went right" piece, but suffice to say that the 2025 Eagles dropped from 4.7 DSRS (a measure of how many points per game the unit is better than average, adjusted for opponents) in 2024, which tied for 1st, all the way down to... 4.5 DSRS, which was third. Still a premier unit, and not the problem with this team. We will focus on the offense.

Kevin Patullo. First things first; Kevin was not the sole problem with the offense, and probably not even responsible for the majority of the issues. I do think, however, that more blame can be laid at his feet than anywhere else and there's evidence to prove that.

There's some gaslighting in different corners of the media that goes something like this: "The offense was actually terrible in 2024 too, you're just seeing it now." I present you with the side by side ranks of several team-wide offensive stats from 2024 and 2025:

STAT	2024 Rank	2025 Rank
Total yards	8	24
Total points	7	19
Total EPA	6	16
Yards per play	11	20
Success rate	14	22
OSRS	8	21

The 2024 unit might not have been elite but was pretty much above average to really good everywhere you look. The 2025 unit was essentially mediocre at best, bad at worst.

What changed then? Surely they had significant personnel turnover?

Position	'24 starter (age on week 1)	'25 starter (age)
QB	Jalen Hurts (26)	Jalen Hurts (27)
RB	Saquon Barkley (27)	Saquon Barkley (28)
WR1	AJ Brown (27)	AJ Brown (28)
WR2	Devonta Smith (25)	Devonta Smith (26)
WR3	Jahan Dotson (24)	Jahan Dotson (25)
TE	Dallas Goedert (29)	Dallas Goedert (30)
LT	Jordan Mailata (27)	Jordan Mailata (28)
LG	Landon Dickerson (26)	Landon Dickerson (27)
C	Cam Jurgens (25)	Cam Jurgens (26)
RG	Mekhi Becton (25)	Tyler Steen (25)
RT	Lane Johnson (34)	Lane Johnson (35)

This is meant to visually illustrate what we already know; the Eagles had remarkable continuity in personnel on offense. Perhaps you could say that this continuity meant they would get old in a hurry, but the average age of the offensive starters was 27.7 years old, which is more than the league average of 26.6 years but not THAT much older.

One more of these comparisons: you'll hear different sources engage in revisionist history, describing the entire Sirianni era as an offensive struggle. That description is, in a word, trash. Here's the list of the five Sirianni seasons with their OSRS score (again, a measure of how much better than average a unit is in terms of points per game, factoring in strength of schedule):

2021: 2.6

2022: 5.8

2023: 3.6

2024: 3.0

four year average: 3.75, which would have ranked 8th this season

2025: -1.8, 21st

So if the personnel was largely the same but production fell off a cliff, you have to look to the sideline for the explanation and Patullo represented the most significant change. Some philosophical issues that I saw with the offense included:

• Having Hurts throw the ball more deeply than he usually does (his 9.0 air yards/attempt was the highest for him since 2021). Unsurprisingly, this resulted in Jalen's lowest on-target rate of his career (74%, far lower than the next lowest figure of 77.8%).

• It's always hard to tell this for sure, but it seemed to me that the route tree being used was way too passive. I'm thinking specifically of the fact that 98% of the routes seemed to be shallow crossers, bubble screens or curl routes, and rarely got to the sticks on a third and long scenario.

• I can't believe I'm about to complain about this, considering that Birds fans tend to have the opposite problem, but this team relied WAY too much on the between the tackles run game. Would it kill the team to throw the ball on first down a little more, or mix in an off tackle run more than occasionally? Saquon didn't have space to work often enough to operate the way they did, and he also wasn't as efficient as the year before (we'll come back to this soon).

• I understand that installing a new offense in the middle of the season is difficult if not impossible, but why were the wrinkles that seemed to give the offense a spark only used sporadically? I'm thinking here of Jalen taking snaps under center, the use of an empty backfield, or a hurry up offense. Each of these provided a change of pace, at a minimum, but were rarely seen for more than a couple series at a time.

There were more problems than just those but they present a snapshot of a play caller that was in over his head and didn't have enough answers.

Nick Sirianni. Let's not let the head guy off the hook entirely. This is the second time he's gone the "let's give the play calling duties to the young offensive assistant who's also my buddy" and it's not worked either time. Nick has always insisted that the offense the Eagles are running is his offense; if so, he needs to take a look in the mirror on this one. Philly needed to do for the offense what they did for the defense in 2024; namely, they needed to hire a grizzled vet playcaller who knows what he's doing and is no threat to bolt for a HC job after just one season. Instead, they went for another young and unproven play caller who will bring in a long-admired system (Shanahan's; more on this in a future article).

Jalen Hurts. We also need to talk about QB1, who (depending on who you talk to) is either blameless in everything that's happened to the offense or is the main culprit. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between, but in short: Jalen didn't have his best season no matter what else was wrong with the offense. Career worsts in bad throw %, on target %, rush attempts per game and the second lowest PFF grade in his career. Can't blame it all on the supporting cast, either: the Eagles allowed a pressure rate of just 20% (compared to a previous career average of 25%) and a drop rate of just 2.6% (previous average 3.85%). Again, the offensive struggles are not all on Jalen but it would be naive to suggest that he's innocent.

Health problems. Not everything that went wrong was the coaches' fault. While there were few season ending or soul crushing offensive injuries, bad health affected the unit more than you might realize:

• AJ Brown, Landon Dickerson and Cam Jurgens ALL missed a chunk of the preseason to deal with various injuries. Brown had a nagging hamstring that the team was infamously quiet about, Jurgens had spent the entire offseason recuperating from back surgery and Dickerson had a "minor" knee procedure in August that threatened to keep him out for the opener. All three played in Week 1 and for most of the year but all three notably regressed, physically and otherwise. Jurgens specifically discussed how hurt he was as far back as the Super Bowl run.

• Two more players who were not starters but were important dirty work role players (Johnny Wilson and Ben Vansumeren) were hurt early and neither took a single offensive snap. Both were expected to contribute as blockers in the run game, a possible partial explanation for the struggles there.

• After a Herculean 482 total touches in 2024, Barkley could not have reasonably been expected to be at the same level in 2025. He wasn't.

• Notably physical blockers Jordan Mailata and Dallas Goedert both regressed in that way this season. Mailata specifically mentioned the protracted and physical season as a cause of notable fatigue in his body.

• Team stalwart and longtime REAL MVP Lane Johnson missed the final eight games of the season; unsurprisingly, the team went 3-5 in those games (8-2 prior).

It's safe to say that the offense had some health issues. I'm going to deal with this more in the What Went Right column but for now, let's just say there's some cause for optimism on this front.

Time to talk about the off field drama. This is as palpable as anything discussed above but easily the most nebulous. No need to rehash it all (painful memories that we all share), but as a quick review: AJ Brown went into meltdown mode two or three times and had to be talked back into the fold each time; Saquon rallied the offensive leaders to that infamous players meeting in October; Jalen continued with the nonstop cryptic remarks about the direction of the unit and the style of play; Lane Johnson's misunderstood but still painful "predictable" comment about the offensive structure; seemingly endless comments about how the offense wasn't working from pretty much every player, etc. In short, you've got a collection of competitive and atypical personalities working in a system that never seemed to get out of quicksand, and with the painful memories of the 2023 collapse still echoing in the Novacare complex (and in fan's memories), bad vibes multiplied like flies.

How to fix the offense? I would have proposed three main changes: 1) shuffle the coaching staff with an eye on refreshing the scheme, 2) try to get everyone healthier, 3) keep the defense elite as a necessary fallback. The good news for Birds fans is that overall the Eagles seemed to achieve all of this. The bad news is that it apparently cost them Jeff Stoutland.

More to come...