September 13, 2021   4 MIN READ

Inside The Birds: “So Poised And Accurate”

Jalen Hurts Shines In Season Opener

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The first win is in the books for Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni as his team demolished the Falcons in Atlanta on Sunday, 32-6.

 

On the latest Inside The Birds, Geoff Mosher and Adam Caplan give their Week 1 takeaways and recap the Eagles’ overall dominance.

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Jalen Hurts

Adam Caplan: “Hurts was so poised and accurate. He had a couple of throws that were short-armed. I don’t know why the ball was short, it didn’t hit, but [he was] accurate as hell. I forget exactly, but he got rushed [one time], he just threw it out of bounds and didn’t put it in harm’s way. No turnovers despite the 14 damn penalties.”

Geoff Mosher: “Say what you want, you can nitpick certain things, we’ve got 17 weeks of Jalen Hurts evaluation. But to me when you’re on the road, it doesn’t matter if the [opposing] defense is good or not, you’re making your first official start as the Eagles quarterback and you’re facing a defense with a coordinator in Dean Pees, whose whole purpose in life is to try to confuse quarterbacks with deception … to not turn the ball over is fantastic. I can’t say enough [about] how important that was. Jalen Hurts did a great job of protecting the ball and putting the ball where the receivers can catch it.”

Kenny Gainwell

Caplan: “There were a couple of things where I was like ‘OK, I didn’t get that to happen, it was cool.’ But I’m telling you these coaches have a man-crush on Gainwell, that’s sort of what I’ve heard behind the scenes and you sure as hell saw it on Sunday.”

Mosher: “I think we’ve been saying since May that this coaching staff was going to get Kenneth Gainwell on the field as long as [he] can show in OTAs and training camp that he can handle it. We see a lot of rookies who look good in shorts and shells and then they look good the first week or two in training camp and then as it goes on, they start to look like rookies. But I will say Kenneth Gainwell has looked the part from beginning to end, from OTAs to training camp, and whatever they’ve asked him to do, he seems to handle it.”

Run defense

Mosher: “The last point I’ll make on the run defense is that I only think it becomes problematic if you’re not doing a good job because it sets up a lot of play action for better teams. The 49ers are going to come in, it’s fine if you can stop them on third down. But when a team runs the ball well on first down, and you’re looking at the 2nd-and-3 and you’ve got good weapons and a good quarterback, it just gives them so much more optionality on what they want to do. That’ll be their big challenge for next week.”

Caplan: “There were some missed tackles in that game on Sunday, there’s no question there were some missed tackles. That was problematic in the first half. It’s one thing if the run fits are bad, okay, you can correct that but missed tackles man. This was a major problem for them last year. It was just one of the many things that was wrong on defense last year other than Singleton, who was an animal.”

 

Javon Hargrave

Caplan: “I gotta tell you [Javon] Hargrave, I understand he got his stuff late, it’s not like he played bad the first half. I cannot wait till he has a game where you go, ‘Holy bleep, this guy looks like a Pro Bowler!’ Not just sacks but tackles for loss, just blowing up the pocket, a hurry as they call it. It’s going to happen because the way it was explained to me was he was unblockable at times in training camp and that’s kind of what you’re looking for for a guy they’re paying as much as they are paying him.”

 

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