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CB Avonte Maddox: Maddox had a rough year, miscast as an outside corner. He has been unable to stay healthy throughout his young NFL career.
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DE Josh Sweat: Sweat had a good season, finishing with 38 tackles, 6 sacks, 9 tackles for loss, and 11 QB hits. He is a rare young player the Eagles can feel good about, but his season, barring some unlikely playoff run, is over.
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OT Jack Driscoll: Driscoll is done for the season with a knee sprain. He had trouble staying healthy as a rookie, but was effective enough when he played. More on Driscoll here.
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LB Nate Gerry: Alex Singleton has taken over Gerry s role as the Eagles three-down linebacker, and has played better.
Vikings at Saints (-7): Two weeks ago, the Vikings were 6-6 and they looked like they had a path to the postseason. Nope. After season crippling losses to the Bucs and Bears, they re essentially on life support.
Drew Brees got his sea legs game out of the way last week against the Chiefs. He ll be better this week against the Vikings suspect secondary.
Buccaneers (-9.5) at Lions: Matthew Stafford and the Lions offensive line are beat up, and the interim coaching staff isn t even allowed in the building currently due to COVID-19 virus tracing.
Stafford s hand will be shook.
49ers at Cardinals (-5): The Cardinals need to win to stay ahead of the Bears for the final playoff spot in the NFC. Luckily for them they get to face Nick Mullens. The Niners have lost 6 of 7, with all 6 losses coming by at least 8 points. A 5-point line indicates that oddsmakers think these two teams are kinda-sorta close. They re not. The Cardinals are slightly above average team, while this injury-rav
That’s what you have to do to win games. You fall on a play, and you stay with it until they stop it. I think we scored six out of seven on the same action, and it s great, Rivers said after the game. I told them, that s what you do, feed the pig. If the play doesn’t, if they can t stop it, keep running it. We did the opposite of that in the first half, where we ran a play and scored twice, and went away from it for five possessions, those are the things that can happen.
The Good
• We re starting a new year, yet we re still revisiting the same old script. The Sixers offense looked out of sorts, they drifted through some possessions on defense and in transition, role players missed shots, and then Embiid came in with a sledgehammer and brought the team within striking distance of a win.
Philadelphia s starting unit looked pretty miserable for most of the night (a subject we ll touch on below), and the turning point of the second half was a unit featuring Embiid at the pivot with shooters at every other spot: Seth Curry, Furkan Korkmaz, Shake Milton, and Mike Scott. In a five-play stretch early in the fourth quarter, the Sixers threw the ball to Embiid on the left block five straight times, and the big guy turned those possessions into 11 points. Even by his lofty standards, that s hard to do.
Kate Frese/PhillyVoice Fans with face masks during the Philadelphia Eagles game against the Dallas Cowboys at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia on November 1, 2020.
With two games to play, the Philadelphia Eagles are 4-9-1, and amazingly still have a path to winning the NFC East, even if it is looking unlikely at this point (+650 according to TheLines.com s consensus odds).
Got questions or comments? Jimmy Kempski has you covered on whatever may be on your mind about the Birds. For those of you who still care about wins and losses, what are the matchups to watch against the Cowboys? Are the Eagles better off winning this crap division, or getting a better draft pick? Did the likelihood of Carson Wentz being dealt increase with a report that Wentz wants out of Philly if he won t start?