Brian Baldinger’s latest Eagles clip has turned into one of those football mysteries that only gets messier the longer people stare at it.
At first glance, the play looks like a familiar zone-read look, with the backside defensive end crashing down and wrecking the run before it ever gets going. Baldinger’s first take on Twitter made that point pretty bluntly, calling it an example of how bad the Eagles’ run game looked. He later deleted that post and replaced it with a different breakdown after revisiting what he had seen.
In the updated version, Baldinger wrote: “. @Eagles @Jaguars i sincerely apologize to @JalenHurts for thinking that this is a read option…When i discovered it was a designed handoff the play makes NO sense unless there is missed assignments with all the new faces…Which might be a possibility. #BaldysBreakdowns pic.twitter.com/THB076ZYBO”
That shift matters, because the whole argument hinges on whether Hurts had any keep option built into the call. On the surface, it looks like the kind of play the Eagles have used plenty of times before, with Hurts reading an unblocked defender and deciding whether to hand it off or tuck it himself. But the evidence got muddied quickly.
One clue came from Jalen Hurts’ postgame comments in London, where he was asked about an early zone-read play on 4th and 1. Hurts said, “I did not have the option to keep it there.”
When Jeff McLane followed up about whether the team planned to involve Hurts more in the run game because of issues at running back, Hurts pushed back: “No sir Jeff, I’ll say you guess, that’s an assumption -”
McLane pressed again, asking whether the question was about a plan for Hurts to run. Hurts answered, “That’s not how the game went. So I would say no.”
The only 4th and 1 play from that afternoon was a shotgun handoff to Will Shipley, and that one was rough enough to deserve its own discussion. But it doesn’t appear to be the play Baldinger clipped. And unless that detail was missed, there wasn’t another Hurts quote in the mix that directly explained the Dameon Pierce handoff shown in the video.
That leaves the whole thing stuck between three possibilities: the design itself was awful, the play really did have a pull-and-run component and everyone got crossed up, or someone simply blew an assignment. The two names that stand out are Markel Bell and Makai Lemon, and either way the setup looks shaky.
If Bell was never supposed to pull, that changes the picture. If Lemon was supposed to handle Josh Hines-Allen, that opens a different kind of problem entirely.
Trying to outrun Hines-Allen without putting a body on him would have been a disaster.
The confusion around the clip ends up saying as much about the Eagles’ offense as the play itself. The re-post, the deleted tweet, and the debate over what was actually called all point to one simple conclusion: this is not a clean operation right now.
Later, the picture got a little clearer thanks to Fran at PHLY. The update was that Makai Lemon was indeed assigned to Hines-Allen, which raised even more questions given the size gap. Fran also pointed out that the Eagles ran the same play later with Darius Cooper, listed at 5’11 and 210 pounds, on Hines-Allen, and that version turned into a positive gain.
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