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For the third straight game, Carson Wentz stood at a podium in the basement of the Linc and tried to explain a home loss.
“To some extent I feel like this press conference is a broken record,” he said.
“We’ve been here a couple times and we know at the end of the day every one of these games is close. This is the National Football League, and we’ve let a handful get away from us now that we’re really kicking ourselves for.”
The Eagles fell to 4-5 Sunday with their third straight home loss, losing to the seven-point underdog Cowboys, 27-20 (see observations).
Wentz’s final numbers looked great, but he once again hurt the Eagles with an early turnover, and his early struggles helped the Eagles fall into a 13-3 halftime deficit that they never really recovered from.
The bottom line is the Eagles are a bad team right now, and the offense’s struggles on the heels of a Super Bowl season are a big reason why.
This is the Eagles’ longest home losing streak within a season since they lost their first four home games in 2013.
It’s the first time since 1998 — the miserable final season of Ray Rhodes’ coaching tenure — that they’ve failed to score more than 21 points in any of their first five home games.
That Super Bowl sure feels like ancient history.
Wentz is like the rest of us. When the latest crushing loss was over, he seemed to be searching for answers, too.
I know this one hurt,” Wentz said. “This one hurt. Sunday night football, divisional opponent, the Cowboys coming into our home? Really, the way we’ve played the last couple times at home is not what we pride ourselves on, and this one hurt. We have a lot of veterans in there, a lot of leadership. I’m going to keep saying the same thing — we’ve all got to look in the mirror. What can we do differently? Where can we be better? We realize a lot of people are going to want to write us off at this point, and now it’s just time to play ball and try to go shock some people.
The only time the Eagles scored more than 24 points this year was against the lowly Giants.
They constantly move the ball between the 20’s and then shoot themselves in the foot in the red zone.
This was the fifth time this year the Eagles have netted 375 or more yards but scored 24 or fewer points.
No team in NFL history has ever done that more through nine games.
Wentz is putting up all-time numbers, but he’s doing it for a losing team. And for all his fancy stats, his slow starts keep killing the Eagles.
“We’ve just got to execute better,” Wentz said. “That comes on my shoulders, it comes on the O-line, it comes on everybody. Execution is the biggest thing.
“It’s really hard to stand up here after a game and pinpoint one thing. But executing some of the situational football and some of that red-zone football … those are just plays we’ve got to hit.”
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More on the Eagles
The big picture is not pretty.
The Redskins are 6-3 and the Eagles are 4-5.
If the Redskins simply go 4-3 the rest of the season, the Eagles would have to go 6-1 with two head-to-head wins to get ahead of them.
Considering the Eagles’ schedule also includes the 8-1 Saints on Sunday in New Orleans, the 9-1 Rams in December in Los Angeles and the 6-3 Texans at the Linc in December that’s awfully hard to imagine.
Heck, what we all just witnessed at the Linc Sunday night, it’s hard to find a team on the schedule you feel confident the Eagles can beat at this point.
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