We’re two weeks into the NFL playoffs, and the Philadelphia Eagles have already delivered two of the biggest outlier passing performances in the past decade of playoff football.
The 2024-25 Eagles are taking the leaguewide “run the ball” resurrection to the extreme. They won in the wild-card round with the lowest dropback success rate of any winning playoff team in the past 10 seasons. In the divisional round, Jalen Hurts finished the game with only 65 net passing yards, the lowest of any team in a playoff game in the past decade, win or lose.
To be fair to the Eagles, throwing the ball downfield and catching passes in freezing temperatures and snow certainly isn’t easy. A.J. Brown even asked that the team be excused for its performance because of those conditions. Plus, relying on the passing game isn’t necessarily optimal when every Saquon Barkley touch has the potential to result in a touchdown.
The Eagles have managed to defeat the Packers and Rams with one hand tied behind their back. But it’s a passing league. A question hangs over the team as it heads to the conference championship against Washington on Sunday: Can the Eagles win two more this way?
Philadelphia has the most talented all-around roster of the four teams remaining, and in my opinion, it’s not even close. Two All-Pro offensive tackles. Two excellent wide receivers. The NFL’s rushing leader. A quarterback who adds positive value to the run game due to his mobility and elite short-yardage conversion rates. A game-wrecking defensive tackle. Quality cornerback play and a tested veteran defensive coordinator. They haven’t lost a game that Hurts has started and finished since September and are the current betting favorites to win the Super Bowl. Every aspect of this Eagles team has prepared it to lift the Lombardi Trophy in New Orleans on February 9. Except for the aspect of football that has become most important this century.
One reason for the passing stagnation is that Hurts is consistently struggling to throw with anticipation. Is this just a flaw of his as a passer? Or is his failure a scathing indictment of the coaching staff and offensive scheme placed around him? The answer to that is a bit of a choose your own adventure right now.
You can absolutely dig into the all-22 and come away uninspired by the route concepts and play designs. You can also find plenty of plays in which Hurts is turning down receivers who would be considered “open” by NFL standards. Depending on your perspective on the Eagles quarterback, you can say that his indecisiveness is hurting the offense or that his mistake avoidance is helping them win games.
This isn’t a new aspect of Hurts’s game, but it is more apparent than ever this season. Hurts is holding on to the ball longer than he ever has.
Average Time to Throw for Jalen Hurts
The Eagles lost offensive coordinator and play caller Shane Steichen to Indianapolis after the 2022 season. Brian Johnson’s one-year tenure as an offensive coordinator in 2023 was viewed as a failure, but there was plenty of optimism that Kellen Moore would innovate and elevate Hurts’s play when the Eagles brought him on. That hasn’t totally come to fruition.
While the run game is imaginative and explosive, the passing game still doesn’t use the middle of the field. The Eagles don’t frequently run play-action concepts. Their pass offense has still excelled against man coverage on the perimeter this season—no receiver averages more yards per route run against man than Brown—but it has struggled to scheme up and pass to open receivers.
By DVOA, this is the Eagles’ worst pass offense of the Hurts and Nick Sirianni era.
Eagles Pass Offense DVOA by Year (Rank)
While this version of the Eagles has prioritized the run game and defense, that hasn’t really been the organizational philosophy that Jeff Lurie has embraced since he became the owner in 1994. The Eagles have hired only offensive-minded head coaches since 1999 and regularly prioritized the most stable and predictable way to contend in the NFL: passing offense.
Lurie’s most successful hires have been pass-first offensive coaches like Andy Reid and Doug Pederson. When the Eagles won the Super Bowl, their running backs were LeGarrette Blount, Jay Ajayi, and Corey Clement. The Eagles leaned on Miles Sanders to run the ball in their NFC title year two seasons ago, then promptly let him walk that very offseason. They didn’t prioritize spending big free agent money or investing a lot of draft capital in the position. The franchise has been a pass-first operation for most of this century.
The general response from the fan base has been that the team should be more run-heavy when things start to go wrong. When the Eagles lost 42-19 at home to the 49ers to fall to 10-2 in December 2023, a few Eagles fans stood outside the NovaCare Complex practice facility on the following Monday morning with a sign that read “Run the Ball.” For most of this season, the Eagles have followed their advice. They ran the ball 55.7 percent of the time—3.2 percentage points higher than the next most run-heavy team. Some of this can be explained by the circumstances of the games they’ve played—the Eagles have played with the lead a lot more this season because their defense went from 29th in DVOA last season to first this year.
The extreme run-heavy approach hasn’t been prioritized throughout the entire season, though. In the first four weeks—when Philly went just 2-2—the Eagles passed the ball more frequently. The Eagles ranked 20th in rush rate in the first halves of their September games. They used Hurts more prominently as a passer—until he had 11 turnover-worthy plays in September. This was unusual for a quarterback who had previously been a solid decision-maker in college and early in his NFL career. It appeared to unsettle the Eagles, leading them to heavily prioritize the run game.
Philadelphia emerged from its Week 5 bye as a dominant team. The defense transformed into an elite unit after struggling against Green Bay, Atlanta, and Tampa Bay before the bye. The entire offense, including the quarterback, also adopted a new philosophy. From Week 5 to Week 16, the Eagles had the highest first-half rush rate in the NFL. (Weeks 17 and 18 are excluded because of Hurts’s absence due to a concussion.)
Sirianni has attracted attention for his colorful press conference metaphors and sideline energy, but one of his frequently mentioned guiding principles is a Bobby Knight philosophy on winning.
During a 2023 press conference, Sirianni held up a picture of Knight with a quote that read: “Victory favors the team making the fewest mistakes.”
Whether Hurts himself has made adjustments or the Eagles have heavily coached him to be more risk averse, his passivity from the pocket is now a defining feature of the Eagles’ pass offense, for better or for worse. The Eagles have been plus-six in the turnover battle through two playoff games.[1]
Hurts has cut down on his mistakes—he’s had just seven turnover-worthy plays in the past 13 games—but the sack rate has reached an alarming level. Sacks often kill drives and are under-discussed relative to turnovers in NFL discourse. On Sunday, the Rams sacked Hurts seven times total: twice on plays that took potential points off the board and backed the offense out of field goal range.
Only two qualified quarterbacks had a higher sack rate than Hurts’s 9.5 percent in the regular season: Caleb Williams and Will Levis. The Eagles’ sack problem has not only continued into the playoffs but has also been amplified. Hurts has been sacked on 18 percent of his dropbacks in two playoff games, with only Sam Darnold getting sacked more, at 18.4 percent.
It shouldn’t be possible for the Eagles offense to allow that many sacks, considering that they have two All-Pro tackles, as well as Dallas Goedert, Brown, and DeVonta Smith as receiving options. Yet here we are.
Brown has had three catches for 24 yards through two playoff games. He dropped a potential touchdown near halftime on a back-shoulder fade, but the Eagles have barely even tried to throw the ball down the field. Hurts is holding on to the ball too long in the pocket, turning down any throw that might be perceived as risky. He held the ball for at least 3.27 seconds on six of his seven sacks in the divisional round.
Two of Hurts’s seven sacks came after he suffered a knee injury as he was tackled late in the third quarter. He walked back into the locker room with a noticeable limp after the game.
We won’t know how much the injury will affect his ability to move until the game kicks off on Sunday. If Hurts’s mobility is limited, it will put a strain on the Eagles’ rushing attack. Normally, Philadelphia gets a numbers advantage on option runs because of Hurts’s ability to keep the ball. If Hurts is unable to scramble, it will also force him to get the ball out more quickly and throw in rhythm. Whether that’s something he’ll be willing and able to do is another question.
Is the rest of the Eagles team so dominant that they don’t need a consistently good passing game to win a title? So far, the answer would appear to be yes. But such teams are few and far between in this century of the NFL.
The 2015 Broncos won in Peyton Manning’s final season even though he had been one of the least efficient passers in the league during the regular season. The Broncos had the league’s best defense and never scored more than 24 points on offense in any of their three playoff wins. Manning did engineer a crucial fourth-quarter game-winning touchdown drive to beat Pittsburgh in the divisional round. He finished the 2015 playoffs with the worst expected points added per dropback of any Super Bowl champion quarterback in the past 15 years, at minus-.223 per play. The Eagles’ pass offense has barely been better than that, at minus-.190.
The only other quarterbacks to win the Super Bowl this century with a negative EPA per dropback in the playoffs were Trent Dilfer in 2000 and Tom Brady in 2001. That was a vastly different era of football. There’s some inherent survivorship bias in the data below—teams who win the Super Bowl usually need to pass the ball better in their biggest games, which the Eagles haven’t yet played—but it shows how much of a relative outlier Hurts would be.
Playoff EPA per Dropback of Super Bowl Champion Quarterbacks in the Past 15 Years
The best comparison for the Eagles’ current roster and situation might be the 2013 Seahawks and second-year QB Russell Wilson. The Seahawks were a run-heavy team whose identity revolved around the “Legion of Boom” defense. At that point in his career, Wilson’s strengths and flaws as a passer were similar to Hurts’s now. He took too many sacks and didn’t use the middle of the field effectively, while he threw an excellent deep ball.
The Legion of Boom dismantled a historically good Denver offense in the Super Bowl, and Wilson and the passing offense just needed to not mess it up.
Similarly, if the Eagles win the Super Bowl, I don’t think many will be surprised. A similar Eagles core came within a few plays of beating the dynastic Chiefs in the Super Bowl less than two years ago. But on that day, Hurts led a dynamic passing offense in one of the best games of his career, going punch for punch with Reid and Patrick Mahomes near the peak of their offensive powers.
The Eagles didn’t really need the passing game on their way to that Super Bowl appearance because they had dominated their first two games against the overmatched Giants and quarterback-less 49ers. Philadelphia had both of those games wrapped up by halftime. The Eagles haven’t trailed in the second half of their first two playoff games this year either, but their lacking passing offense was what nearly eliminated them when the Rams came within 13 yards of taking the lead in the final minute on Sunday.
The Eagles’ passing offense showed its elite ceiling in that Super Bowl loss. Now, it’s not at all clear that that elite ceiling still exists.
If the Eagles do come up short and don’t win the Super Bowl, we’ll know why. The offense might struggle to keep up when facing rookie sensation Jayden Daniels and then potentially demigods like Josh Allen or Mahomes in the Super Bowl.
As with the 2023 Eagles defense, which was untested and got exposed against an elite quarterback in the Super Bowl, we haven’t seen much of the Eagles’ pass offense when the team has played from behind this season.
As long as they keep winning, fans will be happy to look the other way. But if the Eagles don’t win the Super Bowl, the relative absence of their passing game will be the defining story of their season.
