Getty Eagles LB Davion Taylor has been making his impact felt in Year 2 after limited snaps in his rookie season.
The Philadelphia Eagles skipped a normal practice on Wednesday in favor of a walk-through. Head coach Nick Sirianni wanted to let his players’ bodies heal since their late bye week doesn’t come until December 12.
Sirianni traded an extra day of physical rest for a mental workout. He stressed “full speed to the snap” in the walk-through while making sure guys were “100% fresh” for Sunday’s matchup against the New Orleans Saints. The team still put out an estimated practice report and listed three players out, including defensive tackle Fletcher Cox (rest), linebacker Davion Taylor (knee), tight end Dallas Goedert (concussion).
Cox has been taking days off early in the week throughout the season so nothing to read into there. Goedert needs to clear the concussion protocol after getting knocked out from a borderline illegal hit in Week 10. He’ll likely be a game-time decision.
Taylor’s name was an unexpected addition to the injury report, although the second-year linebacker was seen wearing a big brace on his left leg (via ESPN’s Tim McManus). His injury is definitely something to monitor moving forward. There wasn’t too much else to glean from the faux injury report.
Wednesday injury report
Eagles participated in a walkthrough. Today’s report is an estimation.
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Eagles Solve Penalty Problems
Philadelphia had been on pace to shatter the all-time record for most penalties in a single season. The team had 44 accepted penalties through the first four games, or 7.1 flags per 100 plays. The Eagles have since cleaned that up, with 26 penalties in their last six games.
Sirianni revealed he took “drastic steps” to fix the issue. What were those drastic steps?
“When you had a penalty in practice, instead of talking through it with the coaches in the coach’s meeting in the morning, we showed it in the team meeting all together so everybody kind of saw that,” Sirianni said. “Maybe sometimes on a Monday meeting you would be like, ‘Okay, I’m going to talk about this penalty, this penalty and this penalty.’ We showed all those ones instead.”
Best Rushing Attack in Football
It’s really fun being an offensive lineman for the Eagles right now. They own the NFC’s top rushing attack and the third-best ground game in the NFL. Right tackle Lane Johnson could be seen getting visibly excited after several punishing runs by Jordan Howard versus Denver. The three-time Pro Bowler was animated, throwing up his arms and signaling for a first down.
“Feeling comfortable, I guess,” Johnson said. “We played really good football these past three weeks, really balanced, rushing attack’s been probably the best we’ve had here in awhile so I’m excited about that.”
The Eagles are averaging 5.0 yards per carry, with 1,443 total rushing yards this season. Most of the damage has been done with starter Miles Sanders on injured reserve. Now he’s getting set to return to one of the best “stables” in football.
“We got a whole stable, everybody can run, can do good things with the football,” Johnson said. “I’m excited to have him [Sanders] back. He’s a tremendous player, tremendous person, yeah, we got a lot of guys back there.”