Jordan Davis’ eye-opening admission after Eagles late-season collapse

The Philadelphia Eagles lost six of their last seven games of the 2023 NFL season, including their 32-9 Wild Card Round defeat at the hands of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but let’s just be honest for a second here… you could make a pretty air-tight case that the Eagles could’ve really lost nine of their last ten games. We’re looking at an 11-win team whose Expected Win-Loss Record on Pro Football Reference was 8.6-8.4, and to be fair, over the last month of the season, they didn’t even resemble a team that should’ve gotten to eight wins.

A collapse like this often leads to plenty of finger-pointing and multiple rounds of the blame game, and from the sounds of it, the Eagles engaged in plenty of that. But there was one player on the roster who, at least publicly, was only prepared to blame himself for his own output during the second half of the season.

“Have to look in the mirror at the end of the day. I’m a man. I can admit when I’ve fallen off. I fell off at the end of the year. I can admit that.” (h/t Dave Zangaro of NBC Sports Philadelphia).

Those are the words of Philadelphia Eagles defensive tackle Jordan Davis. To be fair, any number of Eagles players or coaches could’ve said something like this at season’s end and it would’ve made perfect sense. But here, it’s the Eagles 2nd-year run-stuffer who admitted that his play during the second half of the season wasn’t where it was at the beginning of the season.

“That’s one thing I have to work on is playing consistently.”

If you peak at Davis’ numbers, you can see a pretty stark drop-off in play that nearly coincides perfectly with the Eagles collapse. In the first seven games of the season, Davis averaged 2.7 tackles per game and had 2.5 sacks and 5 QB hits. From that point on, Davis averaged 2.5 tackles per game and didn’t register a single sack or QB hit. For the season, Davis finished with a lower PFF Grade than Eagles rookie defensive tackle Jalen Carter, and 33-year-old Fletcher Cox, who just completed his 12th season in the league. That’s unacceptable for a guy who was the 13th pick in the draft just two years ago.

Davis conceded that while he didn’t have an injury throughout the season that required him to miss any games, the physical toll of the long season played a role in his diminished productivity in the back half of the season.

“My body is beat. I can tell y’all that for sure,” Davis told reporters. “It’s a long season, long grind. At the end of the day, I know what it takes. I have to do even more.”