After a debacle on Monday Night Football against their hated rivals the Dallas Cowboys, the Philadelphia Eagles tried to rebound on a short week against the Kansas City Chiefs. Following that loss, head coach and offensive play-caller Nick Sirianni took a lot of heat for his gameplan, which largely ignored the run game and put the football in Jalen Hurts’ hands.
If Philadelphia’s opening drive against the Chiefs is any indication, Sirianni had a much better plan of attack against Kansas City, and perhaps learned some lessons from the loss in Dallas.
The drive began innocently enough with a short run from running back Miles Sanders, testing the left side of the Chiefs defense:
The Chiefs largely stop this play from getting going, holding Sanders to a single yard on the ground. But Sirianni was just warming up. On the very next play, he showed the Chiefs a similar run to the edge with Sanders, but instead, Hurts would pull to throw:
This play is a great example of how an offense, even one struggling on the ground like the Eagles, can be effective on play-action if the looks up front sell the run to the defenders. Everything that happens on this play, from the linemen showing outside zone blocking up front to tight end Zach Ertz’s slice block, which turns into a route to the flat, helps sell the run action to the defense. Hurts keeps and slides to the right, before flipping the football to a wide-open Ertz for a 13-yard gain.
On the next play, Sirianni again had a few wrinkles in store for the Chiefs defense:
On this play, the bait for the defense is the potential jet sweep to wide receiver Quez Watkins. The speedy wideout comes in motion towards Hurts before the snap, and as the play begins you can see how the Eagles flow to the right side, with Sanders releasing on a wheel route and Watkins carrying out the fake jet sweep to the right. This gets the defense moving in that direction, as they start to take the bait. The true design of this play? A smokescreen back to the left side to rookie WR DeVonta Smith. With the design and flow of the play baiting defenders to slide away from Smith, and linemen releasing to get downfield in front of the receiver, this play goes for a 22-yard gain, setting the Eagles up in Chiefs’ territory.
Sirianni was not done. He turned to play-action on the very next play, calling for four verticals out of a 2×2 formation:
Again, you see the run action in the backfield help to suck the linebackers down towards the line of scrimmage, allowing Dallas Goedert to get behind the second-level of the defense. Hurts hits his tight end in stride, and the Eagles are down in the red zone.
Remember, to this point in the game the Eagles had run the football just once, for a single yard. Still, the ability to show different looks and bait linebackers with run cues, such as what you see here with guard Nate Herbig pulling in front of the fake handoff to help sell the linebackers that a run play is coming, is enough to get defenders out of position and create space for throws.
Unfortunately, the Eagles would only come away with three points, despite the impressive start to the game. After Sanders was stopped for a two-yard gain on first down, Sirianni called for another vertical concept, this time out of a 3×1 formation. Hurts had an opportunity for six points, he just missed the throw to Ertz:
Hurts does a good job with his eyes here, holding safety Tyrann Mathieu in the middle of the field before throwing this seam route to Ertz on the left side. The quarterback just needs to make a better throw. After his scramble fell short on third down, the field goal team was coming on to give the Eagles an early lead.
While ultimately Philadelphia lost to Kansas City, this drive, and some of the plays that followed from Hurts (who threw a pair of touchdowns and a career-high 387 yards) should inspire hope from Eagles fans in both their quarterback, and their head coach.
After the game, Sirianni said of his quarterback that Hurts played “one of the better quarterback performances I’ve seen.” As we have come to expect from the QB, he had a more muted view of the game. “Look, we lost,” he said. “We lost. We lost the game. We gotta do more, gotta do better. This is what I’m going to say: We got every opportunity to learn, right? Every opportunity, everything you do, you learn from it. And we’re clearly not there as a football team. We lost. But we’re this close (fingers close together). And that’s something that I believe.”
But with the way Sirianni opened this game, putting his quarterback in position to be successful while stressing the Chiefs defense in the process, you can see why Hurts is confident in the future.