What a roller-coaster of a game for the Birds. After a miserable first half on offense, the Eagles finally remembered that they have two of the NFL’s best receivers and mounted a huge comeback Sunday against the Rams.
“The Eagles finally asked Jalen Hurts to be the guy,” play-by-play announcer Joe Davis said on the Fox broadcast. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t, they just hadn’t asked him to be.”
Jordan Davis blocked the potential game-winning field goal and returned it for a touchdown to bring the Birds to 3-0. If you were at the Linc or just want to relive the 33-26 win, here’s everything you missed from the broadcast:
Tush Push
We already knew the Tush Push was going to be a huge topic of conversation heading into the game, after all the discourse from the Chiefs game.
The Birds pulled off two successful Tush Pushes on the first offensive drive of the game, including one for a touchdown. But the fourth-down red-zone conversion probably isn’t going to help the Eagles beat the false-start allegations.
» READ MORE: Grades from the Eagles’ win over the Rams
“You’re going to see there that the right guard does move early before the center moves the ball,” said Mike Pereira, Fox’s rules expert. “It is a difficult play to officiate, of course. We’re looking at this in super-slow motion. In real time, it probably doesn’t look like much, but it was a false start.”
Despite Rams coach Sean McVay’s efforts, it appeared that officials weren’t looking as closely for false starts as fans might have expected.
“You’re probably 2-for-2 on false starts because you can see he moves early,” Pereira said.
Davis reflected Nick Sirianni’s sentiment that when watching the play in slow motion, it’s easy to find faults with something that isn’t as visible in real time.
“On every play, you can find a little something if you slow it down enough,” Davis said.
The Eagles have run more than double the quarterback sneaks of any team since 2022, and have converted them at a much higher rate. The success of the Tush Push allows for Sirianni and the Eagles to be more conservative on early downs and rely more on the running game because they have a shorter field with each set of downs, color analyst Greg Olsen said.
“So much of the conversation around the Tush Push is the aesthetics of it, is it good for the game?” Olsen said. “I don’t think we give enough credit to the Eagles for the sophistication of what that play allows them to do. When they get down there, it’s first-and-8. You have a yard, yard and a half, in your back pocket every possession.”
Pass interference
After all the discourse about the Eagles’ false starts, as soon as Matthew Stafford found Davante Adams for a deep ball touchdown, of course every Eagles fan was looking at Adams’ little push-off at the end of the play to separate from Reed Blankenship. But they actually did call it out on the broadcast.
“That separation there at the end, I know it looks ticky-tack, I know it looks like he had him beat anyway, but that’s PI,” Olsen said. “They got away with one there, but great throw and pass regardless.”
Kickoffs
The Birds had all kinds of trouble fielding kickoffs. Pretty much every Joshua Karty kickoff ended up bouncing right out of the hands of the Eagles’ John Metchie and Tank Bigsby.
But it wasn’t all their fault. Olsen, good friends with Rams special teams coordinator Chase Blackburn, gushed over Karty’s ability to mix up his kicks to give the Eagles bad field position.
“It must be really good: You hate talking about special teams,” Davis said jokingly.
“It’s amazing, last year, we just kicked every ball out of the end zone,” Olsen recounted Blackburn saying. “Now we’ve developed this ability to, he calls them dirty kicks, and he’s like, people just really struggle fielding them.”
Now that the Rams have mastered the new kickoff rules, are we going to ban the squib kick?
» READ MORE: Eagles’ Nick Sirianni outcoaches Rams’ Sean McVay again | Marcus Hayes
Hurts and Patullo
After 2½ games, the Birds finally started taking shots down the field and using A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith. Predictably, they started to find success.
After pulling within one score at 26-21, Jalen Hurts and offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo appeared to have a heated conversation on the sideline. No hot mic moments here (unlike last week), but whatever it was they started trying in the second half worked.
Taunting?
Here’s the Jalen Carter hand gesture that pushed the Eagles back 15 yards after the blocked field goal. Olsen was confused and circled on him gesturing from a distance after the play, but this has the close-up angle at the end.
Tiger Woods cameo
Saquon Barkley’s mantra for the year? “Tiger-mode,” according to Davis. Barkley talked to Tiger Woods in the offseason for advice on how to follow up his massive season.
“If the Rams had read the clips, they’d have known that was going to be a handoff to Saquon when they heard Tiger Woods!” Davis said.
