David Murphy: Can the Eagles be more aggressive on offense? Sure. Be careful what you wish for.

David Murphy, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sep 27, 2025

Published in Football

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

PHILADELPHIA — Some people ooze charisma.

Others ooze compassion.

The Eagles offense just plain oozes.

The defending Super Bowl champions have turned ball matriculation into an art form. Never before has a team with the eighth-most points in the NFL been so deliberate about each and every one. Eight of their nine touchdown drives have lasted at least eight plays. Five of them have gone 10 or more.

You’ve heard of Don Coryell’s Air Raid Offense? This is Kevin Patullo’s School Bus Driving Through a Residential Neighborhood.

Some offenses move like the wind. The Eagles offense moves like wind erosion. Continents have drifted in less time that it takes them to move the ball down the field. In the first three weeks of the season, they’ve mustered just 11 plays of 15+ yards, second-lowest in the NFL. They have one play of 40+ yards, which came in the second quarter of the season opener.

“I think that’s always when we go into every week, that’s what we want to do: want to be the aggressive person, right?” said Patullo, the Eagles’ offensive coordinator and master sergeant of slog. “The word this past week for the offense of when I spoke to the offense was ‘Attack.’ We want to be in attack mode and going into the game, that was what we wanted to do.”

Obviously, you know by now that the Eagles didn’t exactly do it. Not right away, and not before they found themselves trailing the Rams by 19 points on the ol’ scoreboard. It was a tale of two halves, the difference between them being the rediscovery of the NFL’s best wide receiver. A.J. Brown caught six passes for 109 yards. And, lo and behold, the Eagles scored a lot of points quickly.

But people are being a little too quick to conclude that the Eagles unlocked some sort of a secret in the second half of their 33-26 win over the Rams. They are conveniently forgetting the first and last touchdown drives, which mattered just as much as the others. On the first one, the Eagles drove 38 yards on nine plays while taking 5 minutes, 21 seconds off the clock. On the last one, they drove 91 yards on 17 plays for a touchdown drive that lasted 6:54.

This was truly The Greatest Slow on Turf.

Just as significant as the 14 points those two drives yielded is the fact that they combined to eat up nearly an entire quarter of the game.

“I wouldn’t say conservative is the word,” Patullo said. “I think when those things happen, like we went three-and-out obviously a few times. You look at, ‘OK, where was the drive starting? What was the breakdown on the play? What happened? How do we stop this? How do we get out of this?’

“So I think when we look back on it, there’s obviously things we can always learn from that, but you don’t go into it saying like, ‘Hey, I got to be really conservative here.’ That’s definitely not something you want to do. I think it’s just a matter of just going forward, learning from those moments and how to get ourselves out of those situations.”

Can the Eagles stand to take a few more shots down the field? Sure. They currently rank 27th in the NFL in yards per play. The only teams lower are quarterbacked by rookies, backups, or guys who won’t be quarterbacking long.

But the mistake that many people seem to make is to forget that the dang thing seems to be working. The Eagles are 3-0 with the eighth-most points in the NFL. What we saw on Sunday was more a reminder than a lesson. Just because the Eagles aren’t winning with big plays doesn’t mean they can’t.

Nick Sirianni has discovered a formula that works. Protect the football. Grind out tough yards. Win the possession game. Instead of worrying about getting to the goal line, worry about getting to third-and-short. Keep doing that and you’ll eventually get there.

“We’re going to do everything we can do to win the game,” Sirianni said. “We want to make sure that, and I know I’ve talked to you guys about this a lot, we want to be explosive because we know that factors into winning games, and we also want to be able to protect the football and take the football away. I know those things don’t always live in the same world. I think they can live in the same world. Obviously, our success that we’ve had, they have lived in the same world.”

NFL Sundays are full of aggressive offenses that aggress themselves into third-and-longs or turnovers. The Eagles shouldn’t jeopardize their dominance in those two departments through some radical deviation from what they’ve always done well. It may not be pretty in the moment, but that zero in the loss column looks nice.