December 29, 2025
Tina MacIntyre-Yee/Democrat and Chronicle / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Nick Sirianni and the Eagles had an embarrassing offensive showing in the second half against the Bills on Sunday, but still won anyway.
The Eagles beat the Bills, but only by the very skin of their teeth after the offense hurried themselves off the field to give Buffalo every last chance to try and take Sunday's game.
The numbers were bad.
In the second half, the Eagles' offense had five possessions (not counting the final kneeldown) and punted on all five of them. The latter four drives were all aimless and highly predictable three-and-outs, Jalen Hurts didn't complete a single pass at 0-for-7, and combined, the Eagles only moved the ball a total of 17 yards, while holding it for not even nine minutes out of 30.
The level of play looked worse.
The Eagles were slow out of the huddle and not getting the ball snapped until there were only a couple of ticks left on the play clock, which robbed themselves of any chance to make an adjustment at the line while giving the Bills' defense a free jump on the snap. The first two downs were often wasted on sending Saquon Barkley straight into a wall, which kept leaving Hurts in a spot to throw on 3rd and long, with the disadvantage of long-developing routes and the unnecessary handicap of all of them avoiding the middle of the field like it's lava.
So why would the Bills' defense even worry about that part of the field? They didn't have to. They just had to stick to A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith along the sidelines, and bet that, for as good as they are, they wouldn't win out on every contested ball.
All the responsibility for Sunday's 13-12 win fell to Vic Fangio's defense, and all credit to them, they did their job. They kept the NFL's leading rushing attack shut down until a good way into the fourth quarter, punished Josh Allen in the pass rush, and made a major goal-line stand to keep the Bills off the board with time winding down in the third.
The offense, they didn't. Or rather, they did enough of it to take a 13-0 lead into halftime, then phoned it in coming back with ultra-conservative playcalling and poor execution, which left them leaning on their defense to keep bailing them out.
And it all nearly bit the Eagles in the end.
With the defense repeatedly getting left out there, the Bills finally found a breakthrough late, and it took a blocked point-after kick and a botched two-point attempt from Allen on Buffalo's last play to survive it.
In a lot of ways, they got lucky.
Saquon Barkley took a lot of handoffs straight into a wall in Sunday's win over the Bills.
Afterward, head coach Nick Sirianni waxed poetic about how hard it is to win in the NFL.
"You gotta give yourself points when you win football games," he said. "There's always things to clean up when you come out of a football game. But if you come out of a football game where you win on the road, in a hostile environment – they got really good fans – against a really good football team that's had the sustained success like we have...If you come out of this and you're just thinking about all the negative things that happened, that makes for a miserable existence.
"We'll get there. We'll get to what we need to clean up."
But here's the thing: They haven't, and it's been months.
Sunday's win wasn't some kind of gritty, tough, character-defining win for the Eagles. It was an elite defense that has repeatedly done its part getting hung out to dry by an offense that has tried nothing and is all out of ideas, yet has still gotten by to 11-5 with a chance to claim the No. 2 seed in the NFC playoff field anyway.
It hasn't been a one-off either.
This is the same offense that seized up against the Broncos back in Week 5 and let them rally to a fourth-quarter comeback; the same offense that stalled out in Dallas up 21-0 to give the Cowboys an escape to score 24 unanswered; and the same group that listlessly laid an egg against Chicago a week later on Black Friday, then flailed around trying to put together one more coherent drive in the loss to the Chargers before a run of really bad opponents gave them a break.
This is the same stagnant offense that has continued to turtle up, acting like it can still control the ball and kill off ridiculous amounts of clock like it's still 2024.
But it isn't anymore. They can barely hold on to the ball for three plays, much less three minutes when games progress into the back half, and it only continues to build more disdain toward offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo, increasing frustration toward Sirianni, and even aggravation toward Hurts when he can't find the room to make a play and salvage something.
But hey, they won the turnover battle again.
"I don't think it's a conservative thing to have good ball security and be mindful that the turnover margin directly correlates with winning. That's the truth," Hurts said postgame. "That's a well-known fact of what we've been able to do and how we've been able to play over the last five years collectively."
But this season, and narrowed further down to this week, how much does that really matter when you're about to hand the ball back over to the other team in a few ineffective snaps anyway, just to leave your fate up to highly improbable breaks from the defense? – You can't block every kick nor make every goal-line stand.
This has been the Eagles' offensive M.O. all season. It's extremely frustrating to watch during the long stretches where they've tried to survive this way, and rapidly approaching the playoffs now, it's legitimately dangerous to their hopes of contention.
And it's not gritty, it's not tough, and it isn't a show of resilience.
At this point, it's just incompetence, continually excused incompetence. But for how much longer?
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