Michael Clay isn’t hiding from the mess that unfolded on the Eagles’ final kickoff in London.
The special teams coordinator knew his group was already short-handed before the Week 5 loss to the Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, and then the situation kept getting worse. Jeremiah Trotter, Jr. was ejected on the opening kickoff.
Will Shipley and Michael Carter later exited with injuries. By the end, Clay was left trying to survive by moving pieces around wherever he could.
That scramble reached its most painful moment on the kickoff after the Eagles had taken a 17-16 lead with eight seconds left. Nick Sirianni’s choice not to have Jake Elliott boot the ball out of the end zone turned into the key decision after the Jaguars returned the kick and set up Cam Little’s 57-yard walk-off field goal.
Clay made clear he appreciates Sirianni taking the public heat, but he also owned the failure.
“You respect anybody that's going out there to jump on the grenade,” Clay said about what it meant to him that Sirianni turned himself into the fall guy. “But it's not just him. He takes a lot of heat, which I respect, but, obviously, I'm the special teams coordinator here, and we didn't get the job done."
Clay described the final sequence as the product of constant adjustment. Jonathan Jones, who had played a lot of special teams over his 11-year career but not much since 2022, was out there on the decisive return despite logging just four special teams snaps in the game. He had played only three special teams snaps the week before against the Rams.
That may have made him one of the emergency options Clay had to deploy.
Clay said he was doing what he could to place players in spots where they had the best chance to succeed.
“You're just trying to move around puzzle pieces,” Clay said. “You try to put personnel in your best spot.
I think you saw I moved Kelee (Ringo) from the one to the four to the five, tried to put our best players in certain spots to make some plays. At times it worked out, and in the one spot that it didn't, it burned us, and that's on me as a coach.”
Jones did make the tackle on Ameer Abdullah, but it took a chase from behind to finish the play. One second longer, and the clock would have expired before the Jaguars got their field-goal chance. Instead, the Eagles walked away 2-3.
Clay said that’s the kind of split-second moment players can’t really process in real time.
“When you're in the heat of the moment, you're in full trail mode (you’re just thinking), ‘Let me get this guy down,’” Clay said. “I don't think anybody's gonna look up at the clock simultaneously then get the guy down who's running full speed ahead. An extra second off at some point in the game-you're not talking about this-but it would have been a perfect storm to happen.
“You know, they played well for 59 minutes, and the last eight seconds we didn't; we didn't do our job in terms of the kickoff coverage. At times, we got too deep in our coverage, didn't get off blocks, didn't make tackles when we needed to, and that's more on myself than anything else.”
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