The Eagles’ run defense was good.
It really was.
Through the first six games of the 2015 season, the Eagles’ defense had given up just 565 yards (70.6 yards per game). They had the eighth-best run defense in the league heading into the Carolina game.
Since then? Not so much.
The fewest yards they’ve given up on the ground in any game since then was 99. And in three of the last eight games, they’ve allowed their opposition to go for over 200 yards on the ground, including Arizona on Sunday night.
“I think it’s frustrating because I’ve seen us do it the right way and I’ve seen us play well. I’ve seen us tackle against good teams that run the ball well and that’s what we’ve got to get back to this week,” head coach Chip Kelly said on Monday. “We’ve got to learn from it. We’ve got to learn it, we’ve got to teach it better. Again, like I said, I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job coaching and we've got to coach it up better this week because you’ve got another big back coming in in Alfred Morris and we need to make sure we get hats on him and get him to the ground.”
In the last eight games, the Eagles have plummeted from having the eighth-best run defense to the 30th-best. Just two teams in the NFL (Browns, Saints) have a worse yards-per-game average than the Birds’ 134.1.
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No play has demonstrated the Eagles’ struggles in run defense quite like rookie David Johnson’s 47-yard touchdown run in the second quarter of the 40-17 loss to the Cardinals.
On that play alone, the Eagles missed about seven tackles.
“Yeah, it does pop up. It’s inconsistency right now,” Kelly said about poor tackling. “A lot of it’s just fundamental, making sure you’re seeing your target, your heads up, you’re bringing your feet, you’re tackling with your arms, you’re wrapping up. There’s a lot that’s involved in it. It’s frustrating for everybody because we have been good at it at times this year. And then there’s times we haven’t been good at it at all, Tampa Bay game and Arizona specifically.”
On Monday, Kelly said he was “very confident” that defensive coordinator Bill Davis will be able to get the defense turned around, but didn’t elaborate.
All offseason, the Eagles had been stressing the importance of turnovers to their defenders. They even put several tackling dummies around the NovaCare Complex to reinforce the idea of stripping the football.
And for a while, it was working. The Eagles led the league in takeaways for a short time. They’re still tied for sixth in the league with 25, but the focus on stripping the ball might be taking away from tackling.
“I think at times when you look at the film from [Sunday] that we were probably trying to knock the ball out a little bit,” Kelly said. “And, obviously, what we’re teaching and what we gotta get accomplished, and we’re not doing a good enough job teaching it, is that we have to secure the tackle first before we ever go for the strip. That’s kind of how we practice it, but we kind of have to do a better job. And we talked about it this morning as a staff. If that’s what they’re doing, we’re not doing a good enough job coaching them.”