Inside the Eagles’ Field Goal Blocking Perfection

Welcome to the Week 3 grades. Freed by my editors, I no longer have to give one of each standard letter grade for the best and worst of the week. I can now dole out A’s like an under-pressure high school English teacher with a handful of suspect football players in my class, and F’s like professor Snape when there’s no Slytherin around. It’s time to separate the elite from the not-very elite.

In this week’s iteration, we talk to top special teams coordinators about the Eagles’ field goal blocking prowess, we break down what was truly spectacular about the Browns’ win over the Packers and ask hard questions about Michael Penix Jr. and C.J. Stroud. 

Onward!

After watching the Eagles block two kicks to win the game Sunday, I reached out to a top-tier special teams coordinator to see if there was anything spectacular about the blocks that Philly put on. And the interesting part was that the answer was both yes and no at the same time. 

The tackles to Jordan Davis’s right, Byron Young and Moro Ojomo, committed to not blocking the kick and instead sold out on standing up their defenders. This made it easier for Davis to slip through. Similarly, Jalen Carter turned himself in a way that basically put Davis on a person standing sideways. I think this is harder than you imagine, even at the professional level. It’s the defensive equivalent of edge setting, which is such a necessary skill, even though some players at the position routinely eschew those job descriptions to fly recklessly at the quarterback. When a kick block is on, people want to block the kick. It’s human nature. 

While this part of the narrative feels tired at this point, it really does fold into the ethos of this team beautifully. On a day when A.J. Brown finally got his flowers as a receiver, we have to remember that he’s on the field for a ton of run-blocking snaps in a service role and has—for the most part—toned down the kind of deleterious behavior that No. 1 wideouts who aren’t getting the ball tend to exhibit. We have to remember that this offensive line routinely breaks its back for the most physically taxing short-yardage play in the NFL. 

And, on special teams, all their starting defensive tackles, including arguably the best interior tackle in the NFL, took on sidekick roles so Davis could carve out a win utilizing the one advantage the Eagles had left. 

The 13–10 victory over the Packers was one of the most important Browns wins of the past five years, though likely not for any tangible reason that we’ll feel this season. While it’s perilous to look into the future with this franchise, the entire rookie core of this team was dominant against a team that we thought might be one of the best in football. Mason Graham posted a pass-rush win rate of nearly 50% according to ESPN and logged his first sack. Quinshon Judkins scored and logged nearly 100 total yards of offense. Harold Fannin Jr. made it almost another 10 yards after this moment.

Oh, and Carson Schwesinger is stealing souls on a regular basis. 

But what really drew me in was the fact that, before the game-winning field goal, the Browns reassembled the entire offense in roughly five seconds to get off a spike. I asked around about this and 12 seconds—the actual game clock time—is absolutely no guarantee of a successful spike.

My understanding is that Cleveland practices this religiously with a running clock so the team had an idea of how quickly it could execute. Browns center Ethan Pocic even took about a yard loss on the spot so that the official didn’t have to get involved in respotting the ball, which saved the team from a potential disaster scenario in which the official would’ve had to involve himself in the play, respot the ball and take the remaining two seconds off the clock. 

Harrison Smith returned to the Vikings’ defense on Sunday and—poof—it once again became an amoebic machine of terror. This is Brian Flores’s vision, one that allows players to make their own determinations presnap. It just necessitates that those players happen to be available. And, man, was Harrison Smith available Sunday. 

I left the Vikings-Bengals game wondering if this was one of the single greatest individual defensive plays I’ve seen in the past few years. Watch everything that Smith does leading up to the interception. 

In short, Smith cut off each of Jake Browning’s first two reads. That was before he backpedaled out and tipped the eventual attempt to Isaiah Rodgers—who returned 87 yards for a touchdown. 

When I passed the play around to a few coaches, the response I liked the most was simply the emoji of a goat. No added context. And, honestly, none needed. 

Over the first two weeks of the season without Harrison Smith, the Vikings were eighth in EPA and ninth in opponent play success rate. With Sunday’s demolishing of the Bengals factored in, the Vikings are now first in total EPA and fifth in opposing play success rate. 

In going back through Sunday’s blowout loss to the Panthers, my thought was that this was the continuation of two trends we’ve seen from Penix of late, but also a handful of second-year quarterbacks. One is that I think Penix is comfortable reintroducing some of his athleticism and off-platform throwing into the repertoire, which can sometimes occur at ill-opportune times. That, I believe, is a byproduct of Penix not necessarily trusting himself to pull the trigger when the situation warrants it (the second thing). 

Of course, Penix isn’t really a true second-year player. He is roughly three more starts ahead of Cam Ward, and that’s the way we should really be thinking about this. He’s receiving sophomore-level criticism, having just taken freshman classes. When a team gets blown out by the Panthers, 30–0, many troubling thoughts have to come to mind about the health of the situation, and whether we blame the player, the coordinator, the receivers or some combination of the three. 

In looking at Penix’s throws from Sunday, I hate to pull out platitude-ridden coachspeak, but there really isn’t one issue. Against Carolina, Penix got into trouble by short-arming a ball when he wasn’t set. He also threw incomplete passes and had miscommunications with receivers who were running the wrong route or got displaced by a Panthers defender. He also had wide-open shots that were available, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Drake London—which, again, we’re not going to underline as a problem yet because half the teams in the NFL are struggling to get the ball to their primary playmaker. I’m sure the Giants wished, for example, that Russell Wilson looked at Malik Nabers that way against the Chiefs. Then, there were two or three plays where I thought the offensive line broke down to the point where Penix didn’t have any options. 

When we talk about solutions, I have a thought similar to that of Tennessee’s suite of plays for Cam Ward. What if everything—pass and run—was just tied together a little more fluently and Penix was on the run for most of the game? Not scrambling but just on the move. Granted, you can’t do that against Carolina down 30 points, but it seems like Penix and Atlanta are suffering a bit (and, coincidentally, are bottom third in the NFL in play action usage). 

Josh Hines-Allen had seven quarterback pressures Sunday and was absolutely dominant against an increasingly scattershot-looking Texans offense. If we so choose, we can read into this moment from Sunday afternoon in particular as an expression of the overall frustration in terms of how the Texans are jibing offensively with a new coordinator, rebuilt offensive line and replenished receiving corps: 

This all came to a head in the fourth quarter, with the Texans driving. Houston had one more opportunity to tie the game with under a minute to go and was facing a third-and-1 at the Jacksonville 28-yard line. By now you know that C.J. Stroud threw a pick because Hines-Allen tipped the ball. What we didn’t see initially is that the team’s second-round pick left tackle, Aireontae Ersery, had no help against Allen. 

We also didn’t notice that Stroud seemed to have unnecessarily pushed this ball deep when he could have checked down, picked up the first down and given himself a new set of options. The preamble looks something like this.

We’ve seen instances of routes jumbling together and the prevalence of presnap penalties (12 through three games) has made this a code red situation for a promising division favorite facing a three-game hole in the AFC South.

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