The Eagles threw the rope-a-dope during the week regarding the status of Jalen Hurts' sprained ankle, so much so that no one outside Philly knew Gardner Minshew would be the Eagles’ starting quarterback for Sunday’s game against the Jets until Sunday morning.
Given how dynamic Hurts is, it was absolutely valid to wonder if the switch threw the Jets off-guard, having prepared for the second-year star to run the offense his way.
Here’s the problem, though: whether it did or it didn’t, it doesn’t seem the Jets actually know.
Prior to the game, CBS sideline reporter Amanda Balionis said that CJ Mosley had told her the Jets didn’t prepare for Minshew, a report Mosley corrected postgame by saying “I said we didn’t know he was starting.”
Might be one in the same, but given the full post-game words of Mosley, head coach Robert Saleh, and two other defensive players,
“Obviously the quarterback run game wasn’t there, but they did more RPO and short-to-intermediate game, which we knew was coming,” Saleh said.
“A system is a system, and they weren’t going to change it all in one week, but we had to look at what were they going to call more of. Everything they did was expected; the plays were the same, it was just where the ball might go; for example, from a pass game standpoint, where Jalen would tuck and run, we knew Minshew would try to buy time.”
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Fair enough, and that’s exactly what happened, so when Mosley says “it didn’t affect us at all, because they ran the same offense” and that it came down to execution, you can believe that.
“It doesn’t matter who their QB was – the offense they ran is the same one they’d have run if Jalen played. We don’t prepare for one player; we set up for schemes. We base our defense off the offense, the play calls and formations they have set up. Minshew is an RPO-type QB who can run boots and get out of the pocket, the same things Jalen does. One can argue Jalen is the better athlete or has better intangibles or whatever, but we didn’t change our defense. We prepared for the Philadelphia Eagles offense.”
Great...if Minshew and Hurts were the same quarterback. Clearly, they’re not, though, given Saleh’s answer, and given the fact that even though the Eagles ran for 185 yards as expected, Minshew’s 242 in the air were more than Hurts had since Week 4, when he threw for 387 in a loss to Kansas City.
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“You have to stop their run game no matter what; we knew they are the No. 1 rushing offense and prepared for that, but we didn’t execute the way we wanted to,” said defensive back Elijah Riley, who was on the Eagles’ practice squad for that Chiefs game.
Ah, there’s the word, again, execution. Perhaps, execution would’ve been easier had they prepared properly?
“We were preparing for Jalen as we normally would, but we weren’t too worried but we found out today he wasn’t playing,” Riley said. “We approached it no differently, but we didn’t get the outcome we wanted.”
Within the span of two quotes, the entire context of Riley’s words changed, no? They were prepared to stop the run, but if they weren’t worried when they found out Hurts wasn’t playing, how did the Eagles have their best passing attack in two months?
“We were preparing for Jalen,” cornerback Bryce Hall said.
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Telling, even as he tried to later add this: “We saw (Hurts and Minshew) as similar. Obviously we didn’t get the info until this morning, but in terms of the preparation, had we known ahead of time, I don’t think it would’ve changed much at all. We had prepared for what they were going to do in terms of running the football. They did pretty much the same things we were expecting. We knew they were going to try to run the ball, so that didn’t change the game plan much at all.”
Wait, what?
Hall also said that he felt Minshew and Hurts were similar quarterbacks in terms of mobility, but clearly, that’s where the similarities ended. The Eagles were also a passing team the first month – three of the four games Hurts went over even 200 yards came in Weeks 1, 3, and 4 – but they made an adjustment.
The Jets, granted, had short notice, but clearly failed to do that – and given that the news of Hurts’ ankle issue first broke on Tuesday, that falls on the coaching staff.
If only Philly hadn’t dealt their original backup…
Follow Lou DiPietro on Twitter: @LouDiPietroWFAN
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