Mike Sielski: Don't panic. The Eagles will be fine ... as long as Jalen Hurts is.

Mike Sielski, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Dec 22, 2024

Published in Football

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LANDOVER, Md. — For all the reverberations from the substance of some of his recent words, A.J. Brown rarely raises his voice above a whisper when he’s speaking.

Sunday was the same, even if everything for the Philadelphia Eagles wasn’t. They had tried with all their might to cost themselves a victory here against the Washington Commanders, to end their 10-game winning streak and put off clinching the NFC East championship, and they had succeeded. Dropped passes, silly penalties, confusion on defense, a key player ejected for taunting an opponent: The Eagles deserved to go down, and they did, 36-33, and Brown seemed reluctant to pierce the silence of a losing locker room as he balanced the outcome’s short- and long-term implications.

The short-term: They lost. They were sloppy. It happens. Move on.

The long-term: Jalen Hurts suffered a concussion. They could have and should have won the game anyway, but everything else related to his status for the rest of the season is for now a mystery.

“You just fix the things,” said Brown, who had eight catches for 97 yards and a touchdown and who was, one could argue, the only Eagles player who didn’t make a crippling mistake. “You get in the lab, and you try to fix them. That’s it, man. Nobody in this locker room’s perfect. Yeah, we want to win them all. Absolutely. But you’ve got to give yourself some grace. You make mistakes. They made plays. And you’ve got to take your hats off to them.

“We’re all going to be accountable. We’re going to hold each other accountable. That’s what it’s about.”

Good. They can start with two of their best defensive players. With Jalen Carter, who committed an unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty and spent so much time jawing with the Commanders that he appeared determined to get himself thrown out of the game. And with C.J. Gardner-Johnson, who did get himself thrown out early in the third quarter, for taunting.

Three Jayden Daniels passing touchdowns later, Carter was insisting, “I ain’t frustrated at all. I’m moving on to next week.” And Gardner-Johnson was taking to X/Twitter to claim that he “got kicked out for nothing, I play with passion and fire!! Guys was chirping all day what u expect !!” And Brown was still at his locker, making a compelling case that the Eagles can get past one messy day.

“Even in a win, you’re still going to come in and hold each other accountable,” Brown said. “I try to remove the emotion of it. Did we win? Did we lose? None of that means anything. It’s either good or bad. Regardless of whether we win or not, I have to come back Monday critical and accountable and do my job — regardless of the emotion, whether I’m on top of the world or below the world.

“Nobody in here had better lose no confidence.”

Brown’s not wrong to trust so much in his teammates. Yes, Hurts staggered off the field less than five minutes into the game after taking that hit from linebackers Bobby Wagner and Frankie Luvu. It’s true, the offense never looked so steady again with Kenny Pickett at the controls. Yes, DeVonta Smith let the kind of pass that he catches during REM sleep fall through his hands. Yes, if Gardner-Johnson ever departs a game again for any reason — and he departed Sunday’s for the dumbest and most selfish of reasons — Tristin McCollum is likely to be a poor substitute for him. Which he was.

But even without Hurts, the Eagles had to play their sloppiest game of the season to lose in the closing seconds to the second-best team in their division. They have the two bottom-feeders ahead next, the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants, and can and should beat those teams with either Pickett or Tanner McKee (there’s no law that says the skittish Pickett has to start every game in Hurts’ absence) running the show.

The Eagles are still staring down a 14-3 season and the possibility of hosting the NFC championship game, depending on how the conference playoff bracket shakes out. Everything they’ve been chasing all season is still within their reach.

Until everyone has a clearer understanding of whether Hurts will return and when, there’s no cause to believe the Eagles’ season is ruined yet. Brown, Smith, Saquon Barkley, the offensive line, that defense that has been so good for so long: All of those strengths are still in place. All of what happened here Sunday is fixable. All of it except, perhaps, the quarterback. Save the panic until no one has a choice.