Can the Eagles fix Carson Wentz?
Because they're stuck with him for a while either way. Plus, Ravens-Steelers (again!)
Carson Wentz is having a very bad 2020. How bad, you ask?
Bad enough to make “Daniel Jones, playoff quarterback” a very real possibility.
Wentz’s struggles are the termites eating through the foundation of Philadelphia’s playoff hopes. He’s sunk the Eagles to the lower half of a putrid NFC East and pushed the Giants — 4-7 through Week 12 — in position to host a postseason game. His quest to find rock bottom has been an ongoing spelunking expedition through caverns of poor judgement and awful throws. Yet despite an objectively awful season, he still had a tremendous opportunity Monday night to change both his fortunes and his team’s.
The Eagles squared off against an uneven Seahawks secondary at home with first place in their division on the line. If there was any time for Wentz to turn his season around, this was it.
Carson Wentz did not turn his season around.
Philadelphia fell to 3-7-1 in one of the least exciting games of 2020. If you exclude a garbage time drive in the final 1:14 while trailing by two touchdowns against a prevent defense, Wentz needed 41 passes to throw for 157 yards. And while collapsing pockets and a limited receiving corps played a role, many of the young veteran’s passes were simply the football equivalent of calling out random letters in a game of Battleship.
In that GIF, we get to watch Wentz not only skip an out route three yards in front of a covered receiver, but also blank the open man who’d lined up fewer than five yards from his intended target. That’s bad! So what’s wrong with Carson Wentz?
Wentz is failing in nearly every facet of his game
Wentz’s very bad Monday was another symptom of a season that’s been every bit as weird and crappy as 2020 has been as a whole. It’s been extremely difficult to find silver linings for a quarterback in which the Eagles invested $126 million of contract value only 18 months ago.
If QB Wins is your stat, Wentz is 35-31-1 in the regular season and has never won in the playoffs (though he hasn’t stayed healthy enough to throw more than four postseason passes). If passer rating is more your style, his 73.4 mark is by far the lowest of his career and ahead of only Sam Darnold and Drew Lock among qualified starters this season. And if you’re interested in negative plays, the fifth-year QB is in the running for a triple crown of poor decisions:
How’s he been so bad? The quality of the passes he’s throwing has dipped significantly. He’s attempted longer throws that he had in either of the past two seasons thanks to a team that’s often trailing, but
he sucks at throwing them, and
the guys who were supposed to be catching them (DeSean Jackson, Jalen Reagor, Alshon Jeffery, Zach Ertz, and Dallas Goedert, for starters) have been either hurt or ineffective.
As a result, his catchable pass rate has fallen from 2018’s career high of 80.8 percent to a withering 67.9 this season. The only players who’ve been less accurate in 2020 are the aforementioned Lock, Mitchell Trubisky, and Jaguars rookie backup Jake Luton. This is terrible company to keep!
The other major issue is that when he has open receivers downfield he’s failed to find them. Week 12 saw a long list of fly routes and deep runs up the seam designed to exploit the Seahawks’ lack of cornerback depth. Here he is locked on to Jeffery (at the top of the screen) early and identifying his top WR in single coverage. Instead of stepping up in the pocket to make a throw on what should have been a 40-ish yard gain (or more), Wentz feels a little pressure, scrambles to his right, and opts to throw a checkdown route to Miles Sanders.
Not well, mind you.
This brings up another problem; that he’s struggling with short passes as well. Wentz is liable to get jittery in the pocket before making his checkdowns, preventing him from planting his feet and squaring his shoulders to throw or otherwise altering his intended passing path. Instead, he’s throwing on the run more often behind an offensive line that’s allowed pressure on more than a quarter of his dropbacks.
His short range completion rate sat at 75.3 percent in 2018. Now it clocks in at 69 percent. Among NFC East QBs, only Jones has been less efficient with passes between zero and nine yards downfield.
Unsurprisingly, teams are taking his inability to identify holes downfield or consistently make his checkdown throws to dial up more blitzes. Opponents like the Seahawks have worked heavily in Cover-0 (no safety help) or Cover-1 (one safety roaming) schemes in order to increase pressure. Wentz has to deal with an average of roughly 13 blitzes per game; only three quarterbacks in the league have seen more extra pressure.
On the plus side, Wentz has been running more effectively than any point since tearing his ACL late in the 2017 season. His 8.4 yards per scramble is his highest mark in the past three seasons, and he’s run for more than five yards per carry despite an offense that’s begun to shy away from run-pass option plays.
But as far as positives, it’s basically just that and the fact he leads the league in fumble recoveries (because he’s picking up his own dropped balls. This has happened in two of the previous four seasons and is possibly my favorite Carson Wentz stat). Wentz is a problem, and one the Eagles are stuck with for the foreseeable future. He’s due $25 million next season but will eat up more than $59 million in dead cap space if moved (this number drops to $24 million in 2022 and then $15 million in 2023). Philadelphia’s only option right now is to fix its expensive 28-year-old quarterback.
How can the Eagles make this better?
Before the 2019 season, I ranked all three members of 2016’s vaunted quarterback draft class. I put Dak Prescott first and got absolutely lambasted by Philly fans. I’m not writing this as a “told you so,” (in fairness, I called giving him more than $100m “smart,” soooooo) I’m writing this because they had a pretty good point! Wentz was negotiating with the bouncer of the Elite QB Club before the 2019 season after two very good seasons with the Eagles. My colleague, Adam Stites, even placed him at No. 1 in that group!
This is all to say Wentz’s collapse has been the opposite of Mitchell Trubisky’s — unexpected and without even the lingering feeling of schadenfreude for comfort (though your ability to enjoy it may depend on your proximity to Philly fans). The obvious fixes would be to upgrade his receiving corps and offensive line, but the franchise is currently slated to be an estimated $64 million (!!!) over 2021’s shrinking salary cap.
Players like Jeffery, Jackson, and Ertz will likely be cap casualties if they don’t restructure their contracts. Even if they stay, it’s debatable just how much help they are to begin with. Re-signing Travis Fulgham, who was found money as a practice squad addition, may prove impossible.
Upgrading the offensive line will be a little easier assuming starters like Lane Johnson, Andre Dillard, Brandon Brooks, and Jack Driscoll all return to full strength after missing large chunks (or all) of the season. Adding some extra depth, particularly if Jason Peters retires, can be done in the draft, though it’s no guarantee.
Even so, the Eagles are more or less stuck like this, barring significant internal development. 2020 first-round pick Jalen Reagor should get better and Goedert looks great when healthy, but those are just two pieces toward putting Wentz’s shattered vase back together. Neither one will be able to reach their potential in kelly green and white if their quarterback keeps ignoring them when they’re open and slinging passes at their feet when they’re covered.
That leads us to Jalen Hurts, the second-round quarterback who was supposed to be part of head coach Doug Pederson’s gameplan Monday but managed to play only two snaps against Seattle. The former Alabama/Oklahoma quarterback has been very gradually introduced into the lineup, playing only 33 snaps on the season to date. In that span he’s averaged 4.7 yards per rush and completed three passes for 33 yards. Those are encouraging numbers, but this is a very, very small sample size.
Pederson’s trepidation when it comes to Hurts could be a sign he doesn’t yet trust his rookie. Or it’s a sign he doesn’t want to further shake Wentz’s confidence (although if that’s a concern, why spend a second-round pick on a backup QB in the first place?). Either way, it’s becoming clearer and clearer he doesn’t have much to lose by shaking up his quarterback position.
Philadelphia is very bad, yet still just half a game out of the top spot in its division. Whatever they do over the final five weeks of the season, the Eagles will have to do around the tangled marionette it currently starts at quarterback. Carson Wentz isn’t as lousy as he’s been in 2020, but there’s no reason to believe he’ll be any better in the near future. — CD
Steelers vs. Ravens picks, attempt No. 3
OK, let’s try this again, again. A week ago, we included the Steelers-Ravens picks in our pre-Thanksgiving post, only to remove that part when, 10 minutes after we sent out the newsletter, the NFL rescheduled the game for Sunday. So we tried again on Friday with the rest of our Week 12 picks. It was later moved to Tuesday and then again to Wednesday, just the second time in the last 72 years an NFL game will be played on a Wednesday.
And it’s still on, despite the Ravens going 10 straight days with positive Covid results:
The game has been delayed so long that some of the players who first tested positive, like J.K. Dobbins and Mark Ingram, are now eligible to play. But Lamar Jackson is still on the Covid list, which will put RG3 in the starting lineup for the first time since a meaningless Week 17 game against the Steelers last season.
RG3 and the Ravens won that matchup, but these are not those same Steelers. These Steelers are 10-0, have the best defense in the NFL, and aren’t quarterbacked by Duck Hodges. Oh, and they have a chip on their shoulder because … I’m not really sure. Because the NFL wouldn’t let them play on Thanksgiving when the other team was in the midst of a Covid outbreak? That was, like, the one thing the NFL did right this past week (though it should’ve just postponed both it and the QB-less game between the Broncos and Saints and added an extra week to the schedule).
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that our entire panel, including guest picker Dan Kadar, is taking the Steelers in this rivalry game, which starts at the GLORIOUS time of 3:40 p.m. ET thanks to Kevin McCallister’s favorite tree:
I hate the circumstances that led to this, but I’m all-in on a midweek afternoon NFL kickoff. — SH