We can overthink this game of football, right? Sometimes it just comes down to beating the man across the line of scrimmage from you and making a play. And that's what happened with the Eagles' offense on Sunday: They were down by 19 points and they needed to make plays.
And boy, oh boy, did they make plays.
The Eagles roared back in the second half to win the game, 33-26, scoring 26 unanswered points. They opened up the passing game, connecting on plays that gained 38, 33, 25, and 23 yards. Faced with a large deficit, the Eagles responded to the challenge and found something.
After two games in which they controlled the offense with a short passing game and a commitment to the run, the Eagles shocked the Los Angeles Rams' defense with a vertical passing attack.
As they move forward with eyes on another huge challenge – Sunday at Tampa against the 3-0 Buccaneers, could the lessons learned from the win at Lincoln Financial Field serve as something to build upon?
"We definitely are going to try and build on this momentum in the second half," saidsaid wide receiver A.J. Brown, who caught six passes for 109 yards and a touchdown in the second half on nine targets. "There are a lot of things we can do to get better. We're going to learn what we did in the first half and continue to learn what we did in the second half and try to keep the momentum going."
All of the big-play pass catchers reveled in the second half on Sunday – wide receiver DeVonta Smith caught six passes for 44 yards and a touchdown that produced the winning points, and tight end Dallas Goedert had a 33-yard catch and run for a touchdown. Quarterback Jalen Hurts threw three touchdown passes and completed 17 of 24 passes for 226 yards.
It also helped that the Eagles, given the situation, played no-huddle offense – tempo, in other words – and that helped get the offense into a winning rhythm.
"The beautiful part about it is we've been able to play and win in multiple ways. We've been able to play defensive games, play well on defense, and protect the ball and win games. We've been able to be very efficient and potent and have a lot of fireworks on offense over time and find ways to win games," Hurts said. "We've been able to come back from very, very ugly situations and it's a dangerous thing. And Coach (Nick) Sirianni, he talks about it's a dangerous thing when the group never gives up, and this group never gave up. That's what I'm very proud of. I think a win like this is encouraging, but it also lights a fire under everybody to strive for the level of execution that we want.
"We talk about playing for a standard. The standard isn't to produce or to have these numbers or certain statistics, it is to execute whatever we're asked to do. I don't think we did that in the first half. I think we kind of changed our approach in the second half and that definitely helped us weather throughout the game and make plays the way we did."
Tampa Bay and the Todd Bowles defense is next and the Bucs are always a terrific defense and a tough puzzle to solve. The Bucs have allowed just one passing play of more than 40 yards (50 yards to Atlanta in Week 1) in wins over the Falcons, Texans, and Jets. The Eagles and Tampa Bay have played five times since the 2021 season, with Tampa Bay winning four of those games.
But every season is a fresh start and every game is a fresh start and so the Eagles have a new focus ahead.
Winning on Sunday helps the mindset for an offense that did a 180-degree turn to defeat the Rams.
"It is something," Brown said, "that we can learn from and build off of. I truly believe that we've got so many good players on this team and let's play fast and aggressive. Obviously, we're going to run the ball and set up the pass off the run and set up the run off the pass and we have a lot of good players and I feel like you should just let them go."
That is the next step, to build from the win over the Rams. How the Eagles do it and the approach they take, that's what the week ahead is all about.
