The Eagles have a brand-new style of NFL offense, and the early returns suggest it’ll have much more traction than the CB radio.
“It’s a crisp way to run a football team,” Cowboys owner/G.M. Jerry Jones told 105.3 The Fan in Dallas on Tuesday, the day after coach Chip Kelly debuted with a road win at D.C. “I don’t know that that’s a fad. I think the stepped up play may have a place. . . . To me, it did look faster than I thought it would.”
Many agreed. But the problem wasn’t building a lead. Like other high-speed offenses, the problem became holding the lead.
For Kelly, a 26-7 halftime lead while at Oregon was the first step toward a 52-14 final score, with the starters exiting at some point before the end of the fourth quarter. In the NFL, where every team is good enough to mount a comeback (OK, most teams are), drives that don’t consume much time and score little or no points leave the door open longer than it should be.
Then, when the comeback starts and the Eagles try to stop doing what they are spending so much time doing, it becomes even harder to hold the lead.
On Monday night, the Eagles avoided the kind of meltdown that would have been viewed as a Run-N-Shoot style indictment to the Kelly regime.