The Eagles beat the Giants, 34-10 on Sunday to raise their record to 8-7 on the season. Quarterback Jalen Hurts completed 17 of 29 passes for 199 yards, two touchdowns, and no interceptions, but things were pretty rough in the first half, in which Hurts completed just seven of 17 passes for 94 yards and no touchdowns.
There was one missed opportunity for Hurts and the Eagles late in the first half that really could have come back to bite them. With 2:12 in the second quarter, Hurts hit receiver Quez Watkins on a short crosser for one yard on third-and-goal from the New York five-yard line. The drive was over at that point, and Jake Elliott booted a 22-yard field goal on the next play.
That tied the score at 3-3, but what Hurts missed was tight end Dallas Goedert wide open in the right corner of the end zone.
Right after the game, Hurts got all kinds of technical about what he saw, and what he missed.
“Well, put the play in and we’re respecting ‘seven bracket,'” Hurts said. “So basically, [Giants CB Xavier McKinney] from Alabama, he’s bracketing [WR Jalen] Reagor and they’re playing kind of in-and-out, right? But they’re in quarters, Cover 7. So, have to find the single, maybe. But in that play, what I was coached to do is go through it as a pure progression. Work the shallow to the running back coming, only throw that against a certain look. My shallow popped and McKinney fell off and shot through the ball after I threw the ball, so McKinney made a really good play and they busted the coverage back side, so he was wide open over there.
“So, my pre-snap look did not give me what I wanted, to throw the corner to [TE] Dallas [Goedert] but definitely looking after the fact, it’s easy to say, ‘Throw him the ball,’ but you’re going to miss some like that, you know? As a quarterback, you want to play on schedule and get the ball out on time and try your best to do that. Just trust your preparation and your reads and your progressions and you’re going to have guys that pop, but you have to try to stay on schedule and do those things. Those happen.”
As Hurts said, Cover-7 is a man-based quarters coverage in which the defense plays match principles and tries to get the numbers advantage to each side. The bracket aspect of Cover-7 means that the defense is doubling a receiver with a cornerback and a safety. McKinney’s blown coverage left Geodert wide open, but Hurts missed it in the progression of the play.
Head coach Nick Sirianni agreed with Hurts’ assessment.
“Our alert was to Dallas versus a certain coverage,” Sirianni said. “It wasn’t that coverage, so now we read shallow to angle. That’s what he read, so his eyes aren’t there, so I’m not one bit concerned. When you give a quarterback, and you say to him — when you know their reads as a coach you don’t ever get on them when he misses something like that because it’s not a miss. His eyes went here to here and Dallas is only a pre-snap read.
“Jalen doesn’t know that they’re going to bust — they busted the coverage. Jalen doesn’t know at the beginning of that play that they’re going to bust that coverage. They made a mistake. They were out of position on that particular play and that was the read, and so I want to make sure that everybody understands that.”
As Hurts intimated, it’s easy from our side to bash a quarterback when he misses a wide-open receiver, especially in the end zone… but there’s more to the work of playing the quarterback position at the highest level than just running around and finding whoever’s open.