Some teams try to take away what an opposing offense does best. For the Saints on Sunday against the Eagles, the goal was to force their best player to do it all.
“We want to put the game on [Carson] Wentz,” Saints coach Sean Payton told Peter King for his Football Morning in America column.
Wait, what?
As King explains it, Payton concluded, with the help of player personnel analyst Ryan Herman, that the Eagles are 1-11 in games when Wentz plays and the defense allows more than 26 points. Also, Wentz has a record of 0-9 when passing between 308 and 364 yards.
Those numbers are a product of the Eagles not being able to run the ball (which they haven’t been able to do effectively this year), becoming one-dimensional, and being outscored.
On Sunday, they were outscored badly. And Wentz didn’t come close to 308 yards. He generated only 156 yards passing on 19 completions, against 33 attempts. He had no touchdown passes, and three interceptions.
The Eagles mustered only 58 rushing yards. The end result? The defending Super Bowl champs could get nothing going, starting with a pair of three-and-outs (the Saints responded with a field goal and a touchdown) and continuing with an interception, the only touchdown of the game, a three-play drive to end the half (after a Saints touchdown that made the score 24-7), a five-play drive ending in a turnover on downs, a six-play drive capped by a punt, a four-play drive ending in a turnover on downs, another interception, a third interception, and that was that.
For the 2018 Eagles, that likely is that. Although the NFC East remains wide open, the Eagles have plunged from 4-4 to 4-6; they’ll need to run the table or come close to it if they want to have a chance to make it to the postseason. If other teams adopt the blueprint used by the Saints (of course, it helps to have the New Orleans offense), it will be very difficult for the Eagles to accomplish that feat.