DETROIT – Holding on to a three-point lead with 3 minutes, 49 seconds remaining in a game that just a short time earlier looked to be all about the Eagles winning in convincing fashion on the road, the Eagles took possession of the football at their 19-yard line and gained 8 yards on two running plays to set up a critical third-and-2 call.
What to do here? Let the offense lead the way, and give running back Miles Sanders the football. That’s exactly what quarterback Jalen Hurts did and Sanders did the rest, breaking out of a bottleneck situation to bounce outside and find open space on the way to a 29-yard gain all the way out to the 49-yard line. The game wasn’t quite over until, gulp, Head Coach Nick Sirianni had the Eagles go for it on fourth-and-1 from the Detroit 40-yard line with 1:06 to go and Hurts sneaked up the middle for a first down and … the … clincher.
“I didn’t think it was close. I felt like we got enough push that it shouldn’t have been close,” center Jason Kelce said. “Did we go forward? That’s usually a good sign.”
It was a hugely needed series to ice a win in a crazy, roller-coaster kind of an opener as the Eagles – up by as many as 21 points at one point in the second half – left Detroit with a 38-35 victory.
Boom! Here we are, 1-0 and knowing just a little bit more about the Eagles as they started the first of a 17-game, 18-week regular season journey. What stuck out from this perspective …
1. When you win at the line of scrimmage, you dominate. And the Eagles won against a Detroit defense that came out flying around, challenging the offense with the blitz game, and super-aggressively challenging Philadelphia. It took a minute to adjust, and it started with Hurts using his legs to escape pressure for 35 yards on three runs to open the game, and then the Eagles came back with the short passing game – four completions, 62 yards to A.J. Brown – to get the offense untracked. Hurts accounted for a career-high 256 yards of offense in the first half, 67 on 10 rushing attempts and 189 yards on 11-of-23 passing in the half. Then the Eagles scored touchdowns on their two third-quarter drives to lead by 17 after three quarters. In all, Hurts ran for 90 yards and threw for 243 – a whopping 342 yards of total offense.
2. The Eagles converted 9 of their first 13 third downs – extremely impressive – and 10 of 17 overall. Four players – Hurts, Miles Sanders, Boston Scott, Kenneth Gainwell – scored touchdowns on the ground, the…
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