If anyone can stop the Philadelphia Eagles from executing their nearly flawless Brotherly Shove, you would think it'd be Jonathan Gannon.
The Arizona Cardinals coach spent the previous two seasons as the Eagles’ defensive coordinator watching it up close on the field, in meeting rooms, and by talking to the players involved.
He knows it well … very, very well.
Knowing it well and having the talent to stop it is another thing and, on a 3-12 team, you have to wonder about that talent.
We will find out if he can on Sunday when the Eagles host the Cardinals in a Week 17 game (1 p.m./FOX).
"The detail that they coach it with,” Gannon told reporters in Phoenix on Friday. “The players that they have doing it, and the execution of it, truthfully, they're detailed-out on it, they have a couple of different wrinkles from it too that if you want to try to sell out to stop that, you're gonna get burned.
“So you gotta be careful with that too because you don't want a fourth-and-one play or a third-and-one play to go for 30, which they've done to teams. You got to kind of pick and choose your spots there, but something that they do extremely well.”
With the Eagles’ ability to convert on third- and fourth-and-one using the Brotherly Shove, every drive is first-and-nine, not first-and-10 as Nick Sirianni said earlier this season. Eleven of Jalen Hurts’ NFL-record 15 rushing touchdowns have come on the Brotherly Shove.
They have converted all but one brotherly Shove in 37 tries and that was a rare offside penalty on left guard Landon Dickerson.
There has been a lot of talk about banning the play for whatever reason. At first, the critics said it leads to injury, though there has been no evidence of that.
Sirianni said earlier this year, “There’s clearly a talent to it that our guys have. Maybe it’s automatic right now for the Philadelphia Eagles, but it’s not automatic around the NFL."
As the ban-it crowd continued to vocalize their complaints, without any good reason other than the Eagles do it well and no one else does, Sirianni added: “You've seen it across the league. People can’t do it like we do it. ... Don’t ban this play. If everybody could do it, everybody would do it."
Now it’s Gannon’s turn to try to stop and maybe provide a blueprint on how to do it.
Of course, there’s still that matter of having the talent to do it.
Talent or not, Gannon has put his knowledge to the best use he could during the Cardinals’ week of practice.
“You have to prepare for it,” he said, “because it comes up in multiple spots during the game for them. There's technique involved and there's a little bit of will involved, you know what I mean? But it's definitely a tough play to stop.”
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