Chip Kelly no closer to solving QB riddle now than when Eagles dumped Foles for Bradford
PHILADELPHIA – There are times when the tone of Philadelphia Eagles coach Chip Kelly sounds like a purposefully tuned piano – with the center key settling in a hum somewhere between arrogance and annoyance.
It felt a little like that Monday night, with Kelly's Eagles hiccupping their way to a 27-7 win over the division rival New York Giants. In a conventional sense, it was an imperfect, inconsistent, all-important win. Not great, but hey…the Eagles made it. In context, it was more like driving to the end of the street and declaring victory after sideswiping only half the parked cars. You made it, but left plenty to talk about in your wake.
Maybe that annoyed Kelly on Monday – the consistent focus on the micro mistakes, when he deems the macro victory to be the most important part of the night. That's fair. Sometimes it's best to take a breath and remind yourself that things are never as good or bad as they seem in the NFL. But after you're done taking that breath, pop in all the tapes of Eagles quarterback Sam Bradford this season. And then ask yourself: at 3-3 and creeping toward midseason, is Bradford proving he's the long-term answer at quarterback?
Or as Kelly was asked Monday night, how far has he gone on the developmental continuum?
"I don't have an answer, a continuum answer," Kelly said. "I just know he needs to improve. We all need to improve on the offensive side of the ball."
We'll get to some of those improvements in a moment. But first, let's absorb Monday night in the terms that most head coaches prefer. It was a win, despite the Eagles not playing their best offensive game. We get it. That's a fair and important point. It evened Philadelphia to 3-3 with the Giants in the lackluster NFC East – just ahead of the 2-3 Dallas Cowboys and 2-4 Washington Redskins. Staying in that vein, Kelly can accentuate that the defense was a steel trap, shutting out Eli Manning and New York after allowing a game-opening 80-yard drive for a 7-0 Giants lead. And the offense, well, DeMarco Murray had his best game yet … 22 carries for 109 yards and a touchdown. That's two sizable additions to the plus-side of the ledger.
As Kelly said himself:
"We're starting to run the ball better as a group. We hit them with some good play-action passes that really got some good chunk plays for us. Obviously the first touchdown to [Riley Cooper]. We hit Miles [Austin] on a nice seam route."
And again … the win.
"Every single game we play is important," Kelly said. "At the end of the year, what's your final record? … I don't go in and say, hey, it's an AFC opponent, let's just take it easy this week because it doesn't count. They all count."
All of this is true. But it's hard to dive into the victory lap without hitting cement at the bottom of the pool. The most fundamental building block of this Chip Kelly-controlled regime – and most NFL regimes, for that matter – is the quarterback. And through six games, it's a very shaky argument that Philadelphia has found its man. Indeed, looking at the eight games of Nick Foles last season (81.4 passer rating, 13 touchdowns, 10 interceptions, 2,163 passing yards and a 59.8 completion percentage), Bradford has some work to do just to ensure his first eight-game sample isn't a wash when compared to 2014 Foles.
Even in victory, Bradford certainly didn't do himself any favors against the Giants. He badly missed tight end Zach Ertz high and behind on one interception, and overthrew Cooper by nearly 20 yards on another deep-ball turnover. Another pick thrown in Ertz's direction was well short at the goal line, eliminating any opportunity for it to even be a 50-50 ball. And his lone touchdown to Cooper, while conceived on a good-enough throw, did require Bradford's wideout to make a good adjustment on the catch.
When the dust settled, Bradford's rough Game 6 left his touchdown-to-interception totals at nine to nine. Add in two fumbles (one lost) and he looks like a guy with some ball security issues. Which is a worst-case kind of thing at quarterback.
Scattered around all of this Monday, Bradford had some very nice throws, particularly out of play-action, suggesting that the stronger running game and pushing more of the offense under center might help matters. But that doesn't change what he is right not: mercurial at best. Which might not be so bad in a quarterback-starved league, except that Kelly's offense is having arguably its greatest struggles during his tenure, including when Mark Sanchez wilted down the stretch last season.
None of which addresses why Bradford turning it around is so important for both himself and the franchise. He's in the last year of his contract and the two sides couldn't come to an agreement on an extension (to the Eagles' benefit, at this point). Barring a team-friendly long-term deal, which doesn't seem remotely realistic at this point, the Eagles are under the threat of an offseason that has some unpalatable options. Either they keep Bradford under a one-year franchise tag, which could swell to an unfathomable $25 million for next season, or they let him walk, knowing that their package to land him included a 2016 second-round pick (not to mention nearly $13 million in salary this season). Which means if Bradford leaves and the Eagles are in the market for another quarterback in the offseason, they have one less valuable trade chip to arm the pursuit.
Which means this has to be turned around. But the problems aren't all that apparent from the vague vocabulary of both Kelly and Bradford, who keep using "miscommunication" as the catch-all phrase that makes interceptions happen. Part of the problem is that wideouts are running wrong routes, which likely means they aren't reading the defensive coverages correctly and adjusting their pattern. Stuff like this tends to happen in a season when you let go of your No. 1 wideout (Jeremy Maclin), promote a young guy who has not yet shown he can be a No. 1 (Jordan Matthews), depend too much on a limited veteran (Cooper) and then expect a bunch of unproven young guys to pick up the big-play slack (Nelson Agholor and Josh Huff).
Asked specifically what was causing the interception problems, Bradford pointed the finger at himself … and a little more subtly at some of his teammates.
"A couple of them fall on me," he said. "A couple of them, I feel like maybe we're lacking some attention to detail [on] things that need to be cleaned up. … I don't know [what is causing the interceptions]. If I knew, I'd stop throwing them. It's something that I've never really had a problem with in my whole career. I've never thrown a lot of interceptions, so this is kind of new to me. We're going to get it fixed. I'm going to get it fixed."
"We had some miscommunication today on a couple routes where the quarterback and the receiver weren't on the same page," Kelly echoed. "We have to clean that up. We've talked about that, [Bradford] getting more familiar in terms of what we're doing. But we can't continue to do that against really good football teams. We were fortunate that he did it and got away with it today, but in this league you can't do that and sustain things and sustain winning."
Ultimately, that's what it's all about – winning games. And the Eagles managed that Monday night. But there are no illusions about whether the form and fashion can remain a fixture. It can't. Not with Kelly being anointed offensive-wizard-meets-quarterback-whisperer. Foles not fitting can be hung on a past regime. Bradford cannot. He was selected by Kelly, so he fits squarely on his head coach's résumé.
That's the undercurrent that makes this win a little troubling. It was done in spite of the quarterback. And that's not how any of this was supposed to have been built in Philadelphia.
