Eagles Implosion, Michael Penix & More of the BIGGEST SURPRISES This Season – Transcript

00:11We are a month into the NFL season with week four being over on the eve of week five. And the original idea today that I wanted to do was talk to Deontay about something defense specific and really like dive in and chew on some of the schematic stuff that's happened in the league so far. And I was sitting there last night just kind of thinking about how strange the NFL season has felt to this point and just how hard it's been to kind of get a handle on what's real, what's not. I can't remember the exact

00:38impetus for it, but I was just trying to think about the context associated with a certain type of performance and how now it's reframe because we know more about that team than we did two weeks ago. And my takeaway in that entire head spanning exercise was there's just so much chaos right now that I actually wanted to just zoom out a little bit, take a breath, and talk about some of the stuff that has really jumped out to us in either a surprising or striking way over the first month of the season.

01:05And so that's what we're going to do today. Rather than dig in even deeper, I wanted to actually come back and see if we could get some perspective on this whole thing. >> Look, I have a deep appreciation for this. My Slack messages every week have been like, "Oh my god, all these teams are scoring in week one without needing explosive passes." Is that the new meta of the league a week later? That's right back out of the door. It's actually not like that at all. You know, teams that I was, you know, ready to dismiss after a couple weeks start getting hot and, you

01:33know, the opposite is happening in other spaces. So, I think that zooming out and being able to take a look. Honestly, this kind of gives me a chance to breathe for a second and kind of let go of the wheel a little bit. You know, I don't have to white knuckle this thing. We got 17 18 weeks of this before we get to the playoffs.

01:48>> That's exactly why I wanted to spend the the quarter mark of the season feels like a good good time to do this while also acknowledging and I want that to just be the first beat we hit here. I still don't think we know jack [ __ ] Like I truly I do not think we know anything that's real and lasting. I think there are some things that have really jumped out and that's what I want to dig into. But there are no sweeping proclamations to be made. Somebody angry Jaguars fans, which I can understand why they are, were retweeting some of the

02:16conversations that we were having about Trevor Lawrence at me a month into last season when we were just like, "Oh man, Trevor Lawrence struggling. Is this just who he is?" Turns out, no. So, I a month in, it's always best to pump the brakes a little bit, but I do think there's plenty of interesting stuff to chew on.

02:30I remember what it was. I was trying to think about the the uh just the marks of the Panthers season so far and Bryce Young has a monster day against the Falcons in week two and it's kind of like well it's the Falcons defense and then we see what the Falcons defense has done the last couple weeks and it's like well I guess that was even more impressive than we even knew in the moment. And so that's what the first month is. It's just like a constant

02:55exercise in trying to find the right and real context around everything. And so I think we're going to do a little bit more of that today. >> I would think so. And it's funny, right, just how often it's a moving target because I would say like a few seasons ago, I got a month in and I was like, actually, I think I have a pretty good handle on who doesn't matter in this league. And I remember sitting and talking with some of my co-workers, they're like, you feel that strongly going into October? And I was like, yeah, you can just look at some of these teams, some of the underlying metrics, you know, the injuries and all that, you

03:22know, you can kind of cast aside. I think that this year is probably like the absolute inverse of that. like 2024, I felt like we were pretty clear after about a month about who was serious and who wasn't. This year, I I would not I would never, you know, venture to make that same type of proclamation.

03:37>> So, we're going to make about seven or eight proclamations today just about the things that have been surprising to us. The most surprising again surprising/ striking things about the league so far. And talking about things that are over, that's my first one. This era of the Philadelphia Eagles is just over now.

03:52And I don't mean that the Jurgens trade signals they're waving a white flag. I I think it's more complicated than that and we'll dig into the specifics of it. But when you think about the discussion about the Eagles coming into the season and why they could be a team that was a contender, a relevant team to the end of the year, it was a lot of, well, we've seen this group do it before, this group as constructed, they won the Super Bowl two years ago. Like, can this group do it again? And then you look at this team now with Lane Johnson gone, which we can dig into, with the Jurgens trade

04:20happening, with the defense just being a complete youth movement, and there are just aren't a lot of guys around that we recognize anymore. And with the offensive line going from the identity of this team, everything about the Philadelphia Eagles offensively was built upon their offensive line for the last decade seemingly, and now you're looking at this group and we got Willie Lampkin and Drew Kendall and Markeel Bell. And I think just in so many ways,

04:45it really does feel like over the last 48 hours or so, we have shut the door on an entire era of Philadelphia Eagles football. And it just seems like it happened very quickly. >> Absolutely. And I want to kind of address the last piece of what you said first. I can't remember the last time I looked at an Eagles depth chart and looked at their backups and was like, "Oh my god, if somebody gets hurt, this is really, really bad." I'm very I'm much more used to looking at the Eagles F chart and be like, "Geez, dude, you

05:13guys might have two NFL starters sitting behind all pros, right? Like it is just it could not be more opposite from where we were in 2024 in 2022 when this team was gang busters offensively and could do whatever they wanted even if there were, you know, quibbles about what they were doing schematically, right? And and I think that the conjunction the conjunction of Lane Johnson's retirement plus the Cam Jurgens trade was a reminder for me that teams enter seasons with multiple things being true at the

05:40same time. And you're really just waiting to see which truth we land on, right? Based off of the results of the season. And like you were saying, I think the optimistic view is, hey, you've got a quarterback that you've been to championships with and won a championship with. You've got a head coach who has been there and done it.

05:56whatever your, you know, quibbles might be with his approach to the game, game management, you know, questions about what his leadership style may be, you've seen them do it before. You have big Fangio calling this defense. You have all of this bought in goodwill. And then after those two moves happened, I'm sitting yesterday talking with um, you know, our old buddies Bo Wolf, you know, and I'm like, geez, actually, maybe I should have been asking a question that if you had to beg Lane Johnson to come back and he took a hiatus in training camp and he had to beg, you know, Landon Dickerson to give this another shot and

06:24him and Cam Jurgens had to leave the country to go get treatments done on their lower body so that way they could be okay to start the season. Maybe I didn't spend enough time thinking about what the outcome is if that tends to be more of the truth of this team than what I thought more optimistically. Um, and it's just a fascinating place to be for this team. And like you said, I'm looking at them now and you look at the schedule and god, it there is a chance that even their agame might not be good enough for them to leave to live up to the Eagle standard that we got really

06:52comfortable with over the last half decade. And I don't even know what that agame looks like with the current state of the offense and the fact that the defense we expected the defense to come in and be one of those just gamechanging units consistently where they are controlling the way that games are played as the offense kind of figures itself out over the course of the year.

07:11And that just hasn't happened. It hasn't happened with a couple of the defenses we expected that from and we'll talk about that. And so you look at the Eagles right now and if the defense is going to be somewhere around a middle of the pack unit and the offense is going to be in the current state that it's in, we might be looking at another one of those bottoming out Eagle seasons, which they have, right? Even in this run of really sustained success, they aren't really afraid to have these massive dip seasons because it's actually a good

07:38thing to have them every once in a while when you have job security. And I'm talking about the front office, not the coaching staff. when you have that job security because it allows you to have access to players like Devonte Smith and kind of reload with those sorts of guys every once in a while. But I think we're headed more toward one of those Eagle seasons than a season where they're trying to squeeze every last drop out of the roster like the way they have over the last few years. Understandably so.

08:03>> As we're, you know, I know that the conceit of the show is what takeaways we have now. And I think so much of it is actually just like a reminder of certain tin pulls, certain things that are just true about the NFL in general. and that's that this league is built on roster attrition. The fact that you don't just get to be excellent in perpetuity. That you don't just get to keep your continuity and all the guys will be great and you'll stick around and there's going to be some linear, you know, this linear growth year over year and that brain drain is not going to affect you. It is extremely rare that

08:31that is the case for any franchise, even the best of them. And Philadelphia is not exempt. And like you were saying, all the things we believed about Philadelphia's front four, you look now, they've got the lowest quarterback hit rate in the league through four weeks. the lowest rate. You think that's the disease on on defense? Like do you think that's the issue that's plaguing them right now? That that would make the most sense. That's my take away as well.

08:50>> The easiest thing that's the easiest thing to point to that A is causing them problems and b that you can sell yourself on regression back to the mean positively for this defense, right? That they've been they've built this entire thing on being able to get home with four. You've got good enough players to get home with four. You've got to believe that over the course of a 17g game season that more more contact on the quarterback will start happening and you're not going to have to blitz. And then there's also that baked in trust that your defensive play caller who's

09:18one of the greatest that we've seen in the NFL in NFL history will figure out ways to manufacture pressure if that fourman rush is not enough. I think that's your finger crossed case if you're an Eagles fan to say, "Hey, even if this offense actually is bottoms up, we might still be able to squeak a nine and eight, 10 and seven season where we can kind of backdo our way into the playoffs and get ourselves a oneame sample where maybe this defense can win us a game or two." That's I think what you're leaning on right now more than anything.

09:45>> You got to tell yourself a story to get there, though. I mean, that's that feels like a tough needle to thread. I am not not a tape. I can tell you that. >> Yeah, you're you're selling yourself on that. But that ain't what you're seeing on tape. You know, it's not. >> And when I say >> when I say I don't think they're waving the white flag, I think that some people are looking at the Jurgens trade and being like, "Oh man, fire sail time." I don't think so. Like the idea that you'd be able to get some of the key pieces from this team based on one move for Cam

10:10Jurgens to me is misguided. On defense, that's going to be the foundation of the team moving forward. Like those guys are going to be what they build this thing on. The Jerkens trade to me feels like a we know we're not really going anywhere.

10:23This is a guy who doesn't have a position right now because he was really struggling at guard. His body has failed him before. We have long-term concerns about his health. To get offered a second round pick for that player in this moment, given the current state of your offense and the current state of your season, you can't really say no to that. But on a multi-year level, you're still trying to keep the vast majority of this roster together. The question

10:51becomes, how are you going to rebuild this offensive line in time to make the rest of the roster construction matter? Because now you're in a spot where you did it with the defensive secondary two years ago. You were able to kind of refuel the plane in midair to get Q and Cooper Deene in the same offseason and it helped you win the Super Bowl. Can you do that with the offensive line in one single year before you get to a 2028

11:17off season where now everything's on the table? You got two first, you got two second, you got some financial decisions to make about the quarterback. Again, I think the defense, they're they'll play Mitchell, they'll play Deene, they already paid the defensive tackles. Like that was all going to be there. But the offense, it feels like we could be dealing with an entirely different group over the next two years. And I'm just not sure how the offensive line gets back to a place where you're a championship caliber team in the next 12 months given the current state of the offensive line. That's going to be the

11:46real challenge. >> I mean, you would just struggle to find precedent where that happens, right? Like you can find rookie production that can get you back to a championship level at a lot of positions. There's just a year, >> right? The Bears did it in a year the way even even something like what the Browns did this off season. you you can do it in a single year, but even that requires a level of aggressiveness where you're trying to kind of maximize the moment where if you're Howie Roseman, do you care about maximizing the moment for