Eagles Shouldn’t Play The Wide Nine All The Time

The Eagles may have a lot of problems but the D-line is not one of them. In some ways, the front four are the Eagles’ greatest strength right now. They get to the quarterback, no one can deny that, and they provide enough pressure forced errant passes into coverage.

Jason Babin, has seven sacks and has been a marvel signing for a franchise whose heavy spending in the summer now looks to have made the team worse than actually making it better. Indeed the Eagles’ D-line has looked like saints among sinners, especially when you consider how poor the linebackers and secondary have been in recent weeks. There’s just one problem…

With the Eagles playing in their “wide nine” variation of the 4-3, Philly leaves their safeties and linebackers exposed and give teams incentive to run through the middle on many occasions. As we saw last Sunday (and the Sunday before that, and the Sunday before that), teams are more than happy to take that invitation, leading to those type of head-shaking, big yardage gains.

While teams like Steelers, Jets, and Ravens would be better suited to handling runs through the middle, the Eagles just don’t have the personnel to rely on in order to compensate for the gaps that they so often leave when the defensive ends rush the quarterback.

So when considering the Eagles’ Achilles heel is their run defense, and the obvious fact that “big changes” will be made in the wake of this 3-game losing streak that Philly finds themselves in, it just may be time to sacrifice wide nine for a much greater cause, and that is the overall effectiveness of the defense.

While the specifics will be up to the Andy Reid, Juan Castillo and the rest of their men come Sunday, there’s a general framework for how the Eagles could potentially fix their defensive problems, or at least improve from their horrible second half performance against San Francisco, and it goes a little something like this.

The first thing that the Eagles need to do is forget the wide nine, for now, particularly with a game against Buffalo coming up. It looks good. Actually, it looks great when those defensive linemen are sandwiching the quarterback for big losses, but as of right now, the ends just do not justify the means. Having the D-line setup in a standard alignment, and not spread like they are now, would leave the middle less exposed and would help address the issue of teams running down the Eagles throat.

Secondly, Castillo is just going to have to conjure up more blitz packages. Right now, Philadelphia just plays too much zone (more on that later), plain and simple. Against Buffalo, and going forward, they’ve got to think about sending more guys at the quarterback and with different looks, as predictability would become the bane of any defense’s existence. One way or another, these packages will have to include more of a guy we quite frankly have not seen enough of up to this point. Speaking of which…

In hindsight, perhaps it may have been wise to focus on improving the middle of the defense during the summer instead of stacking on cover corners. Whether we like it or not though, Eagles have three of them, three Pro-bowl corners that they can use to their advantage, if done wisely. Should the Eagles decide to gamble more on blitz, stuffing the middle and daring the team to run, they will have to rely on those three guys (Rodgers Cromartie, Samuel, and Asomugha) to pick up the slack. This is where toning down the zone may come into play.

At their best, all three of these guys may be better suited to just zeroing in on one assignment, and going to work, especially Asomugha who was accustomed to simply shutting down one player from game to game. Philadelphia may need to dumb down their defense when it comes to the secondary. This means fewer corners in zone, less of Asomugha starting from a safety position, and just less complication in general. Easier said than done? Of course, but if the Eagles can find a way to use their corners in single coverage, and allow that to be the focus of their defense, then success against the run would surely follow.

Against the Bills this week, a team that has had one of the more potent offenses during the first quarter of the season, the Eagles will have to make big changes, if not for the unique challenges that Buffalo presents, then perhaps just for the sake of change itself. The Eagles are 1-3 after all, and should new adjustments come, the Eagles may just find that more DRC, less zone, and a narrower defensive line may just be the answer to their problems. If not , we can only hope that Reid and Castillo come up with something a whole lot better because Michael Vick may have pronounced the Dream dead, but the nightmare still has yet to be ended. Let’s hope for a win on Sunday.