Nick Foles picked apart a wailing Giants secondary on Sunday, but all four of his touchdowns came inside the 20-yard line. The Eagles lead the league in red zone TD scoring percentage and that doesn’t change just because Carson Wentz is sidelined. Why? Let’s find out…
“It’s incredibly important.” Frank Reich said when asked about the Eagles success inside the red zone. “As a coach, that just fires you up. What we preach all the time is route discipline, spacing is important, play-makers make plays. You design things. You put a lot of thoughts together.
But at the end of the day, it takes players making great plays. That’s what we’re seeing. Then when the ball gets spread around, as a coach, hey, we don’t care if one guy had all the touchdowns or most of them. That would be great. It’s just as long as we’re scoring the points that we’re scoring.
I do think there’s value in the ball being spread around, that they can all share in the love, as they say.”
Foles threw four red zone touchdowns against the Giants, all to different receivers. The Eagles have decimated teams inside their own 20 yard line this year, leading the league with a 66% touchdown conversion when inside the red zone. On the day, Nick Foles completed 71% of his passes in this situation and of course scored four touchdowns in the process.
The Eagles do some magical things when inside the 20-yard line. The play calling is accompanied with varying levels of complexity designed purely to make defenses second-guess themselves. With a ‘pick your poison’ type mentality, the Birds have been able to find great success all year long in a scenario that was more of a setback in 2016…and just because Carson Wentz and his magical scrambling ability are now absent, it doesn’t mean that the offense will crumble when the army marches into enemy territory.
“When we get in the red zone we want to throw the ball into the [end] zone, but that’s not an excuse to be careless.” Reich went on to say. “We still have to maintain discipline.
How do you be aggressive and disciplined at the same time? That’s just a lot of preparation, a lot of practice, a lot of mental drilling. Having that unique ‘it’ factor to be able to do it. That’s why some guys make it and some guys don’t. They can’t figure out how to be aggressive and be disciplined at the same time. Obviously Nick [Foles] has proven he knows how to do that.”
If the win over New York serves as any indication, the Eagles are just getting started when it comes to ripping opposing teams to shreds inside the 20-yard line.
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