The Student News Site of Souderton Area High School

The Arrowhead

The Arrowhead

The Student News Site of Souderton Area High School

The Arrowhead

The Student News Site of Souderton Area High School

The Arrowhead

The Arrowhead

Injuries, inconsistencies plagued Eagles this season

Most of the time this season, fans never knew what to expect from the Eagles week to week.

As several of the Eagles starters were injured this season, the Eagles needed to adapt the way that they played and they haven’t done a great job in doing so.
Ever since going 13-3 and winning the Super Bowl two years ago, the Eagles have now found themselves playing mediocre football only finishing with a 9-7 record for the past two years.
One of the main reasons for this was the inconsistency the Eagles had offensively and defensively, which was partly due to injury.
They lost their entire receiving corp due to injury.
They lost Desean Jackson only after week one. Then, later in the season, they lost Nelson Agholor and Alshon Jeffery.
They also took another hit when they lost running backs Corey Clement and veteran Darren Sproles. Each couldn’t even play half the season before they both went out on injured reserve.
Then at the end of the season they lost their top two offensive linemen guard Brandon Brooks and right tackle Lane Johnson.
To cap it all off, Carson Wentz went out with a concussion just nine minutes into the playoffs, after he took a blow to the back of the head by Jadaveon Clowney.
This forced Josh McCown to finish the game, but it was later found out that he played the game with a torn hamstring.
These injuries lead to their inconstencies on the offense this season.
One example of this is the nine games where Carson Wentz had to throw the ball 40 times or more but they only won four of those.
In the other five games, the Eagles had to play from behind, which lead to head coach Doug Pederson abandoning the run game.
They only had 23 or less rushing attempts in each of those games.
“I mean, there’s no way in the world you can tell them you’re gonna run the ball 10 times in the first half when you’re running the ball well and then you’re going to line up and throw it 22 times. It makes no sense,” Eagles analyst Seth Joyner said on Eagles post game following the loss to the Patriots.
“When it was time to establish the run, you [the Eagles] shied away from it,” which forced Wentz to basically throw the ball on every play creating a “one dimensional” team.
For scoring there were seven games this season where the Eagles were able to score 30 points or more.
Yet there were six games where the Eagles were held to 20 points or fewer.
Injuries also affected the defense, they lost many key defensive players who got injured throughout various points this seasoon.
They lost cornerbacks Jalen Mills, Ronald Darby and Cre’von Leblanc. They also lost linebacker Nigel Bradham for a couple games and defensive lineman Malik Jackson was out with a season ending injury after week one.
This lead to a lot of inconsistency with the defense.
They had four games where they had given up more than 400 yards in total and two more games where the other team was two or three yards away from reaching the 400 yard mark.
There were also six games where they only allowed less than 300 yards. At the end of the season the Eagles were ranked third in rushing defense, but only 19th in passing defense.
In the beginning of this offseason the Eagles have already made a couple of moves so that they don’t have these problems next season.
They hired a new chief medical officer to help with all the injuries they endure.
Offensively they fired offensive coordinator Mike Groh and wide receiver coach Carson Walch.
Hopefully bringing in some new faces and ideas will help this team become better so they aren’t so inconsistent next season.

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