Six Takeaways From the Eagles’ Win Over the Packers in Brazil
Green Bay quarterback Jordan Love was injured in the final seconds of a sloppy game in São Paulo. Here’s everything else you need to know about Saquon Barkley’s debut, Jalen Hurts’s inconsistent performance, the Packers’ shaky new-look defense, and more.
The NFL found some weird loophole to sidestep congressional law and play a game on a shoddy field on a Friday night in Brazil. The Philadelphia Eagles, though they managed to beat the Green Bay Packers 34-29, look different in a bad way without Jason Kelce but also different in a good way with Saquon Barkley. The Packers still look young. And, of course, there’s the biggest story that has more questions than answers: Packers quarterback Jordan Love suffered a lower leg injury in the final seconds of the game. Packers head coach Matt LaFleur repeated three impassioned words when asked about the injury immediately after the loss: “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
But what we do know about the Eagles-Packers slopfest in São Paulo are these six takeaways:
Jordan Love’s Injury Was a Brutal End to a Sloppy Game
In the final seconds of Friday’s game, Love’s left leg got twisted underneath Eagles defensive tackle Jalen Carter. Love reacted immediately, pulling off his helmet and writhing in pain as he was attended to by Packers medical staff. Love, who had been dealing with what the Peacock broadcast described as cramps in his left calf earlier in the fourth quarter, was eventually helped to his feet, and he walked off the field with help.
ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio reported from Brazil that there wouldn’t be clarity about Love’s injury until the quarterback goes through further testing after the long flight home to Green Bay.
Bottom line: It sucks. It was a brutal ending to a sloppy game, and the injury to one of the league’s best young passers could alter the entire landscape of the NFC. The Packers entered this season with legitimate Super Bowl aspirations, most of them contingent on Love’s ascension as one of the league’s top signal-callers. In the hours after the game Friday night, there was still hope that Love’s injury wasn’t too serious, but a quick doomscroll of miscellaneous Twitter doctors dampens any blind optimism pretty quickly. Even if Love somehow misses only a few weeks, that time lost still gives the rest of the NFC North a significant edge, while Green Bay’s shaky (putting it mildly) backup quarterback situation will come under the microscope. It’s hard to imagine any Packers fans slept well last night.
The Packers traded a seventh-round pick for failed Titans third-round draft pick Malik Willis last week, and Willis immediately became QB2 ahead of Sean Clifford, who had an underwhelming preseason. Willis took two snaps after Love was injured, throwing an incompletion and taking a sack to end the game. Would the Packers be confident moving forward with Willis for even a few weeks? What other quarterbacks might be available to sign or acquire in trade? These are questions that can wait until after the Packers’ plane lands back in Wisconsin and the team gets definitive news on the extent of Love’s injury, but they’ll have to be answered quickly in the coming days.
Per Matt Schneidman of The Athletic, Love left the locker room under his own power without “too noticeable of a limp.” That could be viewed as good news if we keep our rose-colored glasses on, but we won’t know for sure until the test results are in.
Saquon Barkley Had a Huge Eagles Debut
Barkley’s first game in an Eagles uniform was the nightmare scenario that kept every Giants fan up at night all offseason. Barkley carried the Eagles offense on Friday night, racking up 132 yards on 26 total touches (24 rushes and two receptions) and scoring three touchdowns.
New Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore delivered a pretty play design that led to Barkley’s first score, calling for double post routes on the same side of the field as Barkley on a wheel route. Barkley raced into the end zone untouched from 11 yards out on the ground for his second score, a testament to the Eagles’ menacing offensive line and Barkley’s explosiveness as a runner. He bullied his way through multiple Packers defenders in the third quarter to complete the hat trick. Barkley also showed off some impressive patience and burst on his longest scamper of the day, a 34-yarder in the fourth quarter that even had the NFL’s official Twitter getting a bit hyperbolic.
Most people expected Barkley to be an upgrade for the Eagles’ run game—he’s the type of dynamic, explosive rusher the offense had been missing in recent years. But with Moore already getting cute in the ways he’s using Barkley in the passing game and with Barkley running behind the Eagles’ bully-ball offensive line, maybe Barkley’s 51-touchdown pace doesn’t seem all that absurd.
Someone (Me) Should Hire Liam Neeson to Kidnap Roger Goodell Until the NFL Improves Field Conditions
I’m all for the NFL playing an increasingly large slate of international games. Giving more people access to the best sport in the world is great. (I actually like waking up at 6 a.m. PT to watch random games on Sundays in the fall.) On Friday, for the first time ever, Brazilians got the opportunity to go to an NFL game. Again, that’s great, even if this international expansion is as much about money as it is about engaging new fans. But if NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is going to fully commit to staging more and more games on more continents and in more prime-time windows, for the love of God, can he and the NFL spend whatever money it takes to make sure the playing field doesn’t suck?
The field at Corinthians Arena in São Paolo was a mess. Barkley’s first official carry as an Eagle went for a 5-yard loss because he slipped as soon as he touched the ball on a toss play. Packers wide receivers Christian Watson and Dontayvion Wicks slipped on multiple occasions, as did Green Bay running backs Josh Jacobs and Emanuel Wilson. Hell, Love nearly fell to the ground untouched on a simple dropback twice in the first half—and one of those missteps contributed to a pass that could have become a pick-six had it not been dropped by the Eagles’ Nakobe Dean. It seemed every replay showed a player slipping.
When LeBron James is posting about the quality of the field, you know it’s bad.
The entire game was a sloppy, slippery mess for both sides, and that’s after Eagles assistant general manager Jon Ferrari reportedly spent months (!) working with NFL field director Nick Pappas to make sure the field was up to NFL standards. Ferrari told ESPN the field was in “great shape.” Spoiler alert: It was not.
Of course, this isn’t the NFL’s (or Philadelphia’s) first issue with a shoddy playing surface in a high-profile moment. The Eagles and Chiefs slipped all over the grass at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, during Super Bowl LVII. (Eagles fans to this day still have an ax to grind with the Sodfather.) In 2019, the NFL pulled a game out of Mexico City on short notice because the turf at Estadio Azteca was deemed unsafe. And players have complained about the field conditions at multiple European soccer stadiums as well.
It’s embarrassing that these turf mistakes keep happening, and it’s hard to take the NFL’s international expansion as anything beyond a money grab until it fixes them. Until Goodell figures it out, I’ll keep workshopping titles for the Liam Neeson movie. (Turf Monster is the front-runner.)
Jalen Hurts Is Still Learning the Offense
There was always going to be a bit of a learning curve with Jalen Hurts this season. His strained—putting it lightly—relationship with head coach Nick Sirianni made every headline this offseason. And playing without veteran center Kelce for the first time has given Hurts a massive amount of responsibility handling protection calls for the offense. Moore is Hurts’s fifth offensive play caller in five years, and he’s installed an almost entirely new offense. It’s going to take time for Hurts to adjust, but unfortunately, it’s time he might not have. The Eagles have been in Super Bowl–or-bust mode since their run in 2022, and the spotlight has been on Hurts to be the guy ever since his $255 million contract extension shortly after that season. It’s a massive amount of change for any quarterback in one offseason, and Eagles fans were hoping to see a new, more improved version of Hurts.
What they saw Friday was inconsistent play that in too many ways reminded them of last season. The Hurts roller coaster might have ended on a high, but it was a terrifying ride. I can’t sum it up much better than my Ringer colleague Sheil Kapadia:
Hurts’s first interception was horrific. He tossed a duck of a pass late over the middle of the field intended for DeVonta Smith, who was running a vertical route from the slot. The throw was so late and floaty that safety Xavier McKinney was able to break away from his half-field coverage and secure the interception. Hurts’s second pick, which came just a play after what should have been a pick-six by Green Bay’s Keisean Nixon, is harder to diagnose from the broadcast film, but it’s clear that Hurts was trying to do too much and never saw Packers corner Jaire Alexander get in front of A.J. Brown in coverage.
Hurts simply has to make better decisions across the board. The interceptions, both botched snaps, and the miscues in the option game all fall on Hurts. He obviously did enough to win Friday, but that effort won’t be enough to do what the Eagles expect of him all season long.
Matt LaFleur Misses Joe Barry
OK, that’s probably not true. Barry’s defense last year was very bad. But LaFleur really didn’t pull any punches talking about new defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley’s unit after the game.
“They were having their way with us,” LaFleur said. “It felt like [Hurts] had a lot of time to throw the football. And I think anytime you don’t get a pass rush … that is really a good offensive line. I just expected more from our pass rush tonight, and when we did bring pressure, a lot of times it looked like guys were uncovered. We had some mistakes, certainly, in the run game especially, we had some blown gaps where Saquon was barreling through there and getting chunk gains. You can’t do that against a good football team.”
LaFleur eventually torched just about everything about his team’s performance in Brazil—including his offense’s red zone struggles after Green Bay managed to score just nine points off three turnovers—but the comments on the defense were sharp. Hurts, though he also made the Green Bay defense look better than it was with a lot of unforced errors, capitalized on Hafley’s patented single-high pre-snap looks with big plays, including the 18-yard touchdown to Barkley and the 67-yard touchdown to Brown. Combining those back-end struggles with the fact that the Packers’ front seven fell completely flat in the debut of Green Bay’s new 4-3 defensive scheme has some Packers fans eager to fire Hafley already. It probably doesn’t help that Barry’s single-game high for points allowed last season was 34, and Hafley gave that up in his Packers debut.
The Tush Push Is No Longer Automatic
It seems pretty clear now that Kelce, and not Hurts and his 600-pound squats, was the unstoppable force behind the Eagles’ famous tush push. The Eagles converted on 37 of 40 tush push attempts last season.
Kelce spent Friday night Tweeting (X’ing?) his way through his first game as an Eagles fan, and with the Eagles facing a third-and-1 late in the fourth quarter, he knew just the play call to, hopefully, ice the game.
“Tush push to end it!!!!!” he wrote.
But Hurts failed to handle the snap from new center Cam Jurgens; the ball hit the ground, and while Barkley was able to recover the fumble, the Eagles failed to pick up the first down and had to kick a field goal, giving the Packers 30 seconds to try to pull off a comeback.
Kelce had a Tweet for that, too.
The Eagles converted just one of their three tush pushes on Friday. On the first attempt, Green Bay’s front stonewalled Philly straight up, and Hurts was tackled for no gain on third-and-1. They could have tried again right there, but Hurts used the hard count to get Green Bay to jump offsides and pick up the first down. Later, the Eagles converted in typical tush push fashion the second time.
The Eagles’ tush push might not be dead, but it hardly looks like it will be the automatic play it had been the past few years with Kelce and Hurts making it work.
