SEATTLE — At the Linc, they’re one of the NFL’s best teams. One of only four NFL teams still unbeaten at home.
Away from the Linc, they’re one of the NFL’s worst teams. One of only five teams that has currently lost at least four straight on the road.
It’s a mystifying disparity. They’re 4-0 at home, with the wins coming by 19, 31, 11 and 9 points. They’re 1-4 on the road, with the only win coming back in Week 2 at Soldier Field against hapless Chicago.
On Sunday, the Eagles will try to win on the road for the first time since Chicago when they face the Seahawks at CenturyLink Stadium, where Seattle is 31-5 since the start of the 2012 season.
“Every week is kind of different,” Carson Wentz said. “Some weeks it’s penalties, some weeks it’s turnovers, some weeks we just start off slow. I think it’s kind of a week-by-week thing.
“Obviously, at home we have been very hot and come out firing most of those games. The big thing is that we finished late in the game last week and that’s something we’re definitely going to build on. As far as the early in-game struggles on the road, I think they’re all week-by-week but hopefully we’re getting over that hump.”
It’s not like the Eagles are getting blown out on the road.
Their four losses have been by 1, 7, 6 and 5 points, and since they won in Chicago by 15, they actually have an overall minus-4 point differential on the road – 12th-best in the league.
But they are losses.
“It’s really not that frustrating,” Malcolm Jenkins said. “You look at every game, there’s no game we’ve been in this year that we felt we couldn’t have won. They’ve all been tight. If we were getting blown out on the road … and I’ve been on teams where we can win all our home games but for whatever reason on the road we get destroyed. And that’s frustrating.
“But the margin for error in this league is very, very slim. Especially on the road. So it’s one or two plays here and there that we need to figure out how to come up with or one or two plays that we inflict damage on our own selves and we need to figure out how to eliminate those mistakes so we can come out of a close road game with a win.”
This is the first time since 1997 that the Eagles have been four games over .500 at home and four games under .500 on the road this early in the season.
In 1997, they won their first four home games and went 6-2 at home but lost their first five road games and finished 0-7-1 away from the Vet.
It’s a tough way to make the playoffs. At some point you need a couple road wins no matter how well you play at home.
The only time the Eagles lost five or more road games and reached the postseason was 1992, when they were 7-1 at home and 3-5 on the road.
So with road games remaining in Seattle Sunday and then Cincinnati and Baltimore in December, the Eagles don’t have a huge margin for error.
“I think it’s ourselves,” Jordan Hicks said. “At the end of the day we’re not making enough plays at the end. We’ve been up. We’ve had the ball at the end. We’ve been in a lot of situations where the outcome could have been different, and we haven’t made those plays.”
In a way, the Eagles are playing some of the most competitive football on the road in the NFL this year.
They’re one of only three teams that has scored at least 20 points and allowed fewer than 30 points in every road game.
In fact, the Eagles are only the 26th team in NFL history to get through its first five road games while scoring at least 20 points and allowing fewer than 30 points in all five.
Of those 26, they’re the only one with a losing record.
And they’re 1-4.
“It’s just execution,” Hicks said. “If you execute, it doesn’t matter where you’re at, you’re going to be playing better. You’re going to have the type of outcome that you’re looking for.
“It seems like our energy level is up a little bit when we’re at home and we’ve got to get that changed. And we expect it to. We’re going into a hostile environment. We have no other option but to come out with a whole lot of energy, because if we don’t it’s going to be a rough day.”
After Seattle, the Eagles are home against the Packers, then at Cincinnati, home against the Redskins and at Baltimore before finishing with home division rematches against the Giants and Cowboys.
Beat Seattle, and the path to the playoffs is much, much easier.
“It’s going to be big for us,” Hicks said. “Every game from here on out is huge for us. It’s a one-game mentality especially on the road.
“This is for us a must-win. We have to win these games, so it’ll be big for us. It’s going to be a dogfight. We expect that. Every game has been a dogfight on the road. We don’t expect anything less.”
Trending