Eagles panic meter after latest offensive collapse against Cowboys

Perhaps Philadelphia Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni wants to move on from the meltdown, but the fans aren’t ready. And here is the Eagles’ panic meter after the latest offensive collapse against the Cowboys.

The Eagles completely blew a 21-0 lead on the road against the Cowboys. They lost 24-21 and wasted a chance to basically wrap up the division title. Also, they opened the door for many questions about their worthiness to defend their Super Bowl title.

Where is the Eagles’ panic meter? It’s 7.5 on a scale of 1 to 10. And here’s why.

Eagles’ panic meter creeping upward

Let’s be straight about this. The panic meter goes up any time a team loses. After the Eagles’ win in Week 11 over the Lions, the panic meter landed at 3. A spike was expected after the loss to the Cowboys.

But it shouldn’t have spiked that high. The reason it did is that the Eagles did not look like a Super Bowl team. Championship teams don’t turn the ball over on back-to-back touches in a tie game in the fourth quarter.

Saquon Barkley fumbled, and the Cowboys recovered. The Cowboys were forced to punt, but Eagles returner Xavier Gibson inexplicably fielded the punt at the 1-yard line. After a short return, he fumbled.

Another thing championship teams don’t do is get sacked on a third-and-two play with under two minutes to go in a tie game. Incomplete pass? Sure. Run play gets stuffed? Understandable. But on third-and-two in that situation, the ball comes out.

Saquon Barkley was open in the flat. Dallas Goedert had inside position in the middle of the field. Either of those options gives the Eagles a chance. Say what you want about Jalen Hurts. He did win the Super Bowl. But this was an awful decision that shows Hurts won’t be able to lead his team back to the big game in 2025.

But what is the biggest reason for the rising panic meter?

The Eagles simply cannot run the football

After Barkley’s historic season in 2024, the Eagles have lost their ability to block for the poor guy. Why? One reason is a lack of preparedness, according to guard Landon Dickerson. Talk about throwing an offensive coordinator under the bus, Dickerson seemed to do exactly that, according to a post on X by Jeff McLane.

Landon Dickerson on the #Eagles’ run game struggles: “They gave us a defense that they rarely run and we just didn’t execute the game plan we had.” Asked what defense, he said, “Just five-down fronts. It’s not usually, typically something they were running a whole lot, and turns out that was their flavor of the day.”

Asked how the O-line can counter different schemes, Dickerson said, “I think a big thing is … time on task. Obviously, you can’t run every play to every defense during the week, so I think we really just have to hone in on having a game plan for every defense that a team has run, and every possible defense that they could run, and make sure that we can execute against all of them.”

Hello, Kevin Patullo. Sounds like that’s on you.

But it’s a bad look for the Eagles. If players from an 8-3 team are throwing barbs at the offensive coordinator at this point in the season, it’s a team in turmoil. And teams in turmoil don’t win the Super Bowl. That’s another reason for the high panic meter.

Arrogance is another reason for the high panic meter

The Eagles used their arrogance to their advantage by building a 21-0 first-half lead. But there’s a difference between arrogance earned and arrogance in the face of failure.

Because they are defending champs, the Eagles have earned arrogance to take into every game. However, when arrogance fails, it has to change into urgency. That never happened against the Cowboys.

The Eagles seemed to be plodding along as their lead evaporated. Sirianni defended the team’s approach, according to a post on X by Eliot Shorr-Parks.

“Obviously, we’re always trying to be a balanced attack,” Sirianni said. “I just think we’ll have to look at ourselves and look at the schemes. We’ll have to look at the execution and see what the issues were. We weren’t very efficient as an offense in the second half. I didn’t really feel we took our foot off the gas.”

But the Eagles did show a lack of toughness at times. On one scramble, Hurts had a chance to bull his way to a first down on a third-down play. He chose to run out of bounds. On another play, A.J. Brown caught a pass and broke a tackle, but ran out of bounds instead of fighting for extra yards.

It simply didn’t look like the desire was there for the Eagles. Keep in mind, the division could have been wrapped up. This was like a playoff mentality situation. And the Eagles failed shockingly.