The Eagles Aren't Good Enough To Make Mistakes

Despite disappointing results in the last two games, the Eagles are a good football team. Going into this week, they were first in the NFL in point differential and second in DVOA. Now, they remain third-best in the former and should stay near the top in the latter.

Two losses, by a combined score of eight points, do not end the season. But they do show us what kind of team the Eagles are: one that can't afford to make mistakes if they want to compete for the division title. 

The truth is that the Eagles don't have many difference-making players. Fletcher Cox and (old but still great) Jason Peters, perhaps. After those two, who can the team count on to consistently win individual match-ups? Carson Wentz has flashes of brilliance. Third down back extraordinaire Darren Sproles is the only explosive play maker on offense.

This roster isn't built to exploit mismatches in talent. It's built on competence. On defense, guys like Brandon Graham, Jordan Hicks, and Malcolm Jenkins form the core, but none of them are keeping offensive coordinators up at night trying to scheme around them. They are good because they do the right thing (most of the time). They won't get you killed and they can succeed within the scheme. Ditto on offense: Jordan Matthews and Zach Ertz are solid starters in the NFL as long as you're not counting on them to be the number one option.

The early season win streak was built on competence in all phases. The defense didn't do anything special with fancy blitzes; it just lined up and got pressure with four rushers. The offense took league-best field position and converted drives into points at the second-highest rate. They did so methodically, not gashing teams with big plays but marching down the field with a mix of efficient runs and short passes (part of the reason Carson Wentz scores so low in Air Yards). Limiting turnovers (to zero for the first three games) and capitalizing on opponent mistakes.

That strategy was effective until this started happening:

As far as I can tell, weeks five and six are the most penalties the Eagles have committed in consecutive weeks since 1989. And those penalties matter. According to friend of the blog Sean Taylor, each additional penalty a team has over its opponent is worth approximately -0.5 points. The Eagles have out-fouled their opponents by 16 in the last two weeks and, surprise, lost by a combined eight points. Add in a couple more unforced errors, like a rookie fifth round pick stumbling out of the gate and a veteran running back fumbling at the worst possible time, and you can see how the Eagles went from 3-0 to 3-2.

Again, this is not to bury them. They are still a good team that should be at least in the race all season. But it's not like teams we've seen in years past that could spot an opponent a three touchdown lead and roar back in the final minutes. There are too few #playmakers and not enough strengths. That means they either have to return to the suffocating competence of the early season—limiting turnovers and penalties, staying efficient on offense, and preventing big plays on defense—or come up with a new way to win... like putting more in Wentz's seemingly-capable hands.

Different Place, Same Face: McNabb Hasn't Changed at All

If you believe, as I do, that McNabb has been basically an average or slightly-above average quarterback over the last three seasons, then the next question was: how long can he sustain that production?

We know that McNabb, at almost 34 years of age, has plenty of wear on his tires. Was it possible that in the next year or two he could sustain a drastic drop in performance? Or would his experience continue to hide his slowing body?

So far, at least, McNabb’s shown that he’s capable of producing in the same way. Admittedly, it’s a small sample size, but his per game numbers are similar or better than last year in almost every catagory…

Why Trent Cole Should Hold Out of Camp

As a fan, it’s tough to support a player who holds out of training camp. No matter how much less a player makes than he “deserves,” he’s still getting a boatload and a half more than anyone you know. All fans care about is the team — and any player who holds out appears to care a lot more about themselves than winning a championship.

But, in all honesty, while I don’t necessarily want Trent Cole to hold out at the beginning of training camp, I think he should for his own sake.

First of all, it’s not like he needs to learn or compete in training camp. He’s the starting RDE and that’s not going to change with a few days or weeks missed. I’m all for working out with the team and getting in shape for the season, but there’s not much for Cole to gain at Lehigh. And there’s something positive about keeping him from suffering a Stewart Bradley-esque injury.

Second, he’s clearly underpaid. Foxsports.com compares Cole’s contract to Julius Peppers’s, but let’s put that aside for now. Soon, Cole won’t even be the top-paid defensive end on his own team — that distinction will go to first round pick Brandon Graham, who will get north of $12 million guaranteed cash (Brian Orakpo’s haul last year) before ever taking an NFL snap. Cole’s gotta be looking down the line, wondering why he can’t get some of that dough.

Third, Cole’s not getting any younger. He’s only 27 now, but he’s played in 65 straight games including in the playoffs. He can’t, and shouldn’t, count on that streak continuing forever. With that in mind, Cole deserves to be paid at least close to market value for the last few years of his prime. You never know when that window could close, and it will likely happen before he gets to free agency in 2014.

But the key point is number four: Cole’s never going to have better leverage to renegotiate his deal. Think back to the summer of 2008. Brian Westbrook was coming off a career year that put him at the top of running backs in the NFL. More importantly, he had proven that he was by far the most valuable member of the team. Westbrook parlayed that, coupled with a holdout threat carried over from his refusal to attend camp in 2005, into another contract extension (ok, so it was basically just a raise).

Cole is in a similar situation now. He is by far the most important player on the defense, and may be the most indispensable guy on the team. Just as the Eagles recognized that Westbrook was their only weapon on offense going into 2008 and drafted DeSean Jackson, so they have indicated how thin they are on the defensive line by completely reloading at that position. Sure, Graham may become great and eventaually replace Cole the way DeSean replaced Westbrook, but right now Cole’s playmaking and all-around production remain invaluable. If he wants to renegotiate his contract, the Eagles have to listen.

Plus, because Cole is indispensible and so obviously underpaid, he likely wouldn’t receive the same vitriol from the public that is often directed at training camp hold outs. Or would he? What do you think?

A Second Look at Defensive Playmakers

One of the keys to the 2010 Eagles season will be the performance of the defense. Last year the unit was, at best, inconsistent and this offseason we’ve seen a good deal of turnover. Sheldon Brown is gone. So is Darren Howard, Chris Clemons, Will Witherspoon, Sean Jones. Stewart Bradley returns, along with a whole host of draft picks and other new additions such as Darryl Tapp and Ernie Sims.

But it is often difficult to isolate individual player performance from team performance. How do we know whether the guys the Eagles jettisoned were truly underperforming? Hopefully this post will offer one possible way to gain some insight into that, simply by crossing two streams (oh no!) of data: one from Advanced NFL Stats and the other from Pro Football Focus.

Let’s start with Brian Burke’s Advanced NFL Stats measurement of +EPA as a measurement for defensive players. As he explains here, +EPA measures positive performance: “the value of every sack, interception, pass defense, forced fumble or recovery, and every tackle or assist that results in a setback for the offense.” What the stat doesn’t do is show you when the player did something wrong — when he cost the team. Thus, one would expect risk-taking players such as Asante Samuel to score disproportionately well in this system. His positive achievements regarding turnovers are huge, while his negative tackling ability never gets factored in.

Still, even with this caveat, it is an interesting way to look at players as playmakers. Here are the Eagles’ numbers from last year as put up by Burke, ordered by +EPA per the number of games they played in.

Obviously bland +EPA is of little use to determine who’s a better player. It’s far too dependent on the amount a player is on the field. At least Burke’s +EPA/G differentiates by number of games played to factor out some of the bias from players who played constantly and without injury. However, when I looked at this for the first time, I realized that games played was only a half step toward the greater goal of figuring out who caused the most postive plays, per play.

This is where Pro Football Reference’s play charting data — where they count how many times every player is on the field — comes in handy. Here’s for the Eagles. By looking at +EPA by play, rather than by game, you can get a much more “accurate” reading of playmakers. Below you can find the +EPA per time the player was on the field defensively (+EPA/Play), as well as a number that shows how much +EPA he would have accumulated had he played every defensive snap in the average Eagles’ game (~65).

Observations from this data (feel free to post your own in the comments):

• The fewer times a player was on the field, but active in the game, the more unreliable his numbers are going to be. Looking at you Tracy White and Quintin Demps.
• On the other hand, those who racked up huge play totals as well as +EPA/Avg. G (Trent Cole, Asante Samuel) clearly form the backbone of the playmaking contingent of the team.
• Darryl Tapp’s numbers with the Seahawks: 39.8 +EPA total, 704 plays, for a +EPA/Avg. G of 3.67 — placing him right near the top of the list.
• Ernie Sims’s from Detroit: 14.8 +EPA total, 490 plays, for a +EPA/Avg. G of 1.96 — positively Bunkley-ian.
• The scheme also affects opportunities for playmaking. For example, all four of the main defensive tackles fall in a row toward the bottom, indicating that the Eagles have been using the position less for playmaking, and more for solid building blocks of run defense. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Darren Howard, who often played as a DT in pass-rushing situations, giving him many more opportunities to make plays.
• But the fact that Howard was able to cause that pressure when he was in the game is important. While we can’t see some of the negative plays he may have allowed, Howard was clearly a better pass-rushing option than Chris Clemons, who made barely more +EPA per play than Mike Patterson. One has to wonder if Clemons for Tapp was a steal and/or if the Eagles will miss Howard’s rushing ability on third down.
• Other players who seemed to provide little in the area of playmaking: Macho Harris, Sean Jones, Chris Gocong, Will Witherspoon.

It’s worth mentioning one more time that this is far from the final answer at evaluating defensive performance. However, by combining +EPA with play counts, we gain one more interesting nugget for individual evaluation.