Change is Coming With Jalen Hurts, Eagles Offense
PHILADELPHIA – Change is coming for Jalen Hurts and the Philadelphia Eagles offense.
There will be motion. There will be more snaps from under center. Hopefully, there will be fewer than the countless and ineffective receiver screens the Eagles used the past few years.
Offensive coordinator Kellen Moore has been allowed to breathe life into an offense that quite frankly flat-lined last year, an offense that became way too predictable.
“There will be tweaks, there will be changes,” said Moore in early May. “Everything is constantly evolving. That’s part of this whole off-season program. We got to the first week of actually being on the field with these guys. Once you get on the field, things just start evolving.”
“We’re at a beginning level of this thing, said Moore. “We’re really excited to go through this process. With phase 3 get a little more field work. When you get to training camp is when you can hammer the run game and the play-action game and how that stuff connects.”
The offense, of course, starts with Hurts.
Last year, he spent 93.5 percent of snaps in shotgun or pistol, per Pro Football Focus. It’s a formation he has become comfortable with because it’s mostly all Nick Sirianni has run since arriving in 2021.
Moore had Los Angeles Chargers QB Justin Herbert under center for 18.9 percent of his snaps when the Eagles offensive coordinator was in L.A. a season ago. When Moore was in Dallas, he had Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott under center for 43.5 percent of his snaps in 2022.
The potential for more success in play-action is greater when a QB lies up under center.
Moore also wants to incorporate more motion in the offense. Sirianni rarely used motion and his teams have always been near the bottom in that category.
Moore is expected to change that. It is something his offenses have always utilized, he said, going back to his high school days with his dad as his coach and on to his QB days at Boise State.
“It’s always kind of stuck with me,” he said. “There’s obviously advantages to it. There’s some things that you’re trying to gather information for the defense, and there’s other times you’re simply stressing the defense. I think there’s those two elements.
“Ultimately you’re trying to build packages and create things so that the run and the action game and the drop-back game. There’s alignment and similarities with the presentations that allows us to stress the defense with those different looks.”
Ed Kracz:
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