2020:
The beginning of the end
The Eagles needed speed at wide receiver, that much was clear. What they didn’t ‘need’ to do was draft a quarterback in the second round…but they did it anyway. Much to the unrest of the entire City, Jalen Hurts was selected with the 53rd-overall pick.
With team needs ignored, Roseman defended the pick by emphasizing the desire to become a ‘QB Factory’. The Eagles had leaned so heavily on the availability of a strong backup QB that it made sense to start up the conveyor belt once more since Nate Sudfeld still wasn’t ready to become a QB2. But in no way was it an indictment of Wentz. No way at all. Not one bit.
The truth is, you could be in the most committed, stable, and happy relationship on the planet, but if you tell your significant other you’re going for Dinner with a Super Model, they’re naturally going to ask questions…and those questions in this case may well have opened an unresolved bucket of chaos.
Wentz has had every reason to doubt the Eagles’ trust in him 2017. Anonymous sources and a franchise love for a backup QB would do that to anyone. But with a $128M commitment to him made just months before, why bring in a Heisman runner-up now?
We all tried to make sense of it. We all hypothesized, we all wondered. Maybe it was the ‘Marty effect’ after the team’s newest offensive coach spent 2018 working with Lamar Jackson and implementing 2-QB sets. Maybe it really was just supposed to be taken at face value. Either way Wentz couldn’t let it beat him.
The unfortunate truth was that he didn’t need to. The team had already done that job for him and Wentz simply jumped on the inner war with himself.
The regression
There’s no doubting that Carson Wentz regressed in 2020, he fell off of a production cliff like very few do. But it’s not like there was a huge difference. Mechanically, Wentz hadn’t been the same since the departure of John DeFilippo. Press Taylor just wasn’t getting the best out of him, or anywhere close to that.
His footwork was sloppy, he was still throwing off his back foot and making risky decisions. The same decisions he’d always made that had just previously gone unpunished. The balls sporadically launched at the floor during a sack were now picked up by defenders. The tight-coverage throws were picks, and he spent most of the year running for his life.
There are obvious factors here:
- Sacked more than anyone else.
- Hit more than anyone else.
- Injuries to skill position players.
- Awful playcalling that only hampered him instead of playing to his strengths.
- A total lack of run-support
But with each passing loss, frustrating game, and visible mistake, the pressure grew. The looming threat that had followed Wentz his entire career now brought with it an eventual replacement. It was no longer just hypotheticals and TV debates. This was real. Carson Wentz wasn’t just running for his life, he was running for his job.
The pressure builds
Everyone from his idol, Brett Favre, to TV analysts, to former teammates were quick to give their takes and all of a sudden a fire turned into a hellscape. It was beyond all control. Doug Pederson looked more and more like he was about to have a meltdown with each presser that came and went, yet refused to make any schematic change to help his QB.
Wentz was isolated in a room of 53 men. He was the only one with the weight of a team on his shoulders, struggling to carry it as his Head Coach watched on and his replacement waited patiently.
Eventually, enough was enough. Jalen Hurts entered the game against the Packers after a poor first half from Wentz and that was it.
Endgame.
The floodgates open
It had happened again. Wentz was back to the sideline while an offense magically contorted into new previously unseen shapes. Jalen Hurts didn’t fix the offense, but he was clearly part of the solution in masking some of its many flaws as opposed to exposing them as Wentz did.
At this point, Carson Wentz needs a change of scenery. Badly. It doesn’t matter what he does from this point out, he’ll always be in somebody’s shadow. Whether it’s that of Jalen Hurts, Doug Pederson, Nick Foles, or his own, the Eagles have done nothing but help form the blackhole that their franchise QB has been desperately trying to escape from.
Carson Wentz isn’t a broken quarterback. Damaged, but fixable. He has taken gut punches from just about every angle including teammates present and past. The Eagles did nothing but incite it. The team was quick enough to cut Zach Brown after he criticized Kirk Cousins and made himself look silly, but stood back and watched as Carson Wentz battled a locker room that caved in on him.
This was the story of how the Eagles destroyed the best thing to happen to them in over a decade…and unfortunately, the ending isn’t set in stone. But all signs point to it being an unpleasant read that only further pushes Carson Wentz to the edge.
Photo credits: Icon Sportswire
