This better not be the new normal for the Eagles offensive line

There are lots of words one could use to soft-pedal a critique of the Eagles’ offensive line in Week 1.

Uneven. Inconsistent. Uncharacteristic.

They are words that allow a little leeway, words that grant some level of benefit of the doubt. That is to say, they are words that one may feel desperate to err toward after a performance like that of the Eagles’ run and pass blockers in their 24-22 season-opening win on Sunday. Landon Dickerson, Cam Jurgens, Jordan Mailata, Lane Johnson — these guys deserve every ounce of the political capital they’ve accrued during their time together as a unit. Let ye who hath never paved the way for a 2,000-yard rusher en route to a Super Bowl cast the first stone.

And yet …

The surest sign of the bottom line is the dancing you do around it. The bottom line for the Eagles run- and pass-blockers is this: They were not good enough in Week 1. Not even close.

The final numbers don’t do it justice.

Jalen Hurts was sacked three times, a total the Eagles surpassed in seven games even in 2024. But that total doesn’t come close to capturing the pressure the Commanders were able to generate throughout the game. Hurts scrambled seven times for 46 yards, mostly out of necessity.

“I thought Jalen did a great job of making plays, especially when something wasn’t going right,” Jurgens said.

Saquon Barkley averaged 5.5 yards per carry, which is something he did in just three games all of last season. But his 42-yard run off a vintage jump-cut in the first half is doing more than its fair share of work in padding the average. On his other 14 carries, he gained 41 yards.

If you didn’t watch the game, all of this might sound like cherry-picking numbers and mathing the math to match a preexisting narrative bias. That’s not the case. If anything, the preexisting bias goes in favor of this offensive line. This was a game flow thing. It is a second-and-long, third-and-long thing. The Eagles faced way too many of those situations throughout Sunday’s win.

“It’s tough to be in those situations,” Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni said. “We’ll look at the tape and see and evaluate that thing. But no doubt, to do everything you want to do as an offense, whether that’s some tempo that we did on the ball, whether that’s being able to take some deep shots down the field, get multiple guys carries. You’ve got to get into the flow of the drive. We know that’s important and we’ll be working like crazy to do everything we can do to get that fixed.”

Hurts put it more succinctly.

“We shouldn’t be in third-and-17,” the Eagles quarterback said.

Unsaid was why they were there. Almost exclusively, it began up front. Two holding penalties on Jurgens. One on Dickerson. A false start on Mailata. Add in the sacks. Add in the negative runs. It adds up.

You want to talk numbers? Here was the craziest one. One team had 10 tackles for loss. The other team had two. The team that had 10 was not the team with the vastly better defense.

The funny thing about critiquing the Eagles offensive line is that it can be difficult to remember what fallibility looks like. Most of the NFL lives a life much worse than the one the Eagles lived on Sunday. At the same time, we judge this offensive line by the standard it has set, and we do it because that standard has been the foundation of their formula.

This is an important point. The Eagles are a good team. It would take a heck of a lot of unforeseen circumstances for the season to truly go sideways. In today’s NFL, a team can lose only so many games when it has a dominant defense and a competent quarterback who doesn’t make mistakes and can make big plays. We saw that throughout Sunday’s win. As close as the score was throughout, as theoretically “in-the-game” the Commanders were, was there ever more than a fleeting doubt about the end result?

Even when Washington was driving for a potential game-tying touchdown in the closing minutes of the fourth quarter, the odds still said somebody would make the play that Moro Ojomo did in stuffing Washington’s shovel-pass on the woulda-coulda-shoulda two-point conversion to even the score at 24-24. You only get that peace of mind by drafting superstars and pairing them with great coaching, The Eagles have done both of those things. Because of it, and a soft schedule, their bare minimum win total should be enough for a playoff berth. The floor of this team is set by its defense.

The ceiling? That will be set by the offensive line. For as long as Hurts has been QB1 and Sirianni has been head coach, the Eagles offensive identity has been the same. The quarterback will manufacture a certain number of big plays on his own accord. The rest of the time, the offensive line will wear you down with a steady stream of four- and five-yard carries on first and second down. As smart as new offensive coordinator Sean Mannion may be, as needed as some of the ongoing changes to this offense are, it is naive to think that everyone can simply snap their fingers in unison and become a team with an identity dramatically different from what it has always been.

To be clear, nobody inside the locker room seems to think that is what they are attempting. Sirianni, Hurts, Mailata — all understand what they need to be. The Eagles’ genius as an organization has always been their understanding of and prioritization of football’s longest-standing fundamental.

“I really do think we can get back to where we were two years ago,” Mailata said. “We’re going to keep evolving this offense as we go. Today was a good start.”

Let’s hope he can speak it into existence.