The Eagles are finally about to get a look at the player they paid to headline the edge.
Jonathan Greenard is expected to make his Philadelphia debut Monday night against the Bears after missing all of training camp and the first two weeks of the season with a pectoral injury. For a team that handed him a four-year, $98 million deal this offseason, this is the moment the wait ends - even if the full version of Greenard is still a little ways off.
The important part is simple: he should matter right away.
Greenard isn’t expected to jump straight into a full snap load, and that’s no surprise given how long he’s been out. He missed two months, spent the early part of the injury recovery unable to do much conditioning work, and the Eagles have handled his return carefully. He was limited until Saturday, and Vic Fangio made it clear last week that the veteran won’t be ready to carry a full workload.
"He's not only coming off inactivity, he's coming off an injury," Fangio said last week. "His injury for a good bit -- the first, I don't know, four to six, seven weeks -- he really couldn't do a whole lot conditioning wise either. So yeah, he's nowhere near ready for a full load."
That means the Eagles will ease him in rather than force the issue. Greenard is expected to rotate with Nolan Smith and Jalyx Hunt, with Greenard likely starting on the right side and Smith on the left. Smith and Hunt should still handle most of the edge snaps, but Greenard’s presence changes the shape of that group immediately.
Even if he only plays around half the game, he can still leave a mark.
That matters because Smith and Hunt are the two most affected by Greenard’s return. Both have held up reasonably well through two games, but the bar was set pretty high for them entering the season.
Hunt has posted a 16.3% pressure rate without a sack. Smith is at 16.7% with one sack and has been solid through the first two weeks.
The Eagles entered Week 3 eighth in the league in pressure rate, but there’s a catch: their time to pressure sits at 2.8, and opponent time to throw is 3.43, both last in the NFL. That points to the secondary doing its part in coverage while the rush takes longer to arrive.
If Greenard helps Smith and Hunt get home faster, the whole pass rush can look different. The comparison here is Jaelan Phillips and the way his presence changed things last year.
This still figures to be a week-by-week process, and the biggest question remains Greenard’s health. Last November, a shoulder injury slowed him down, and he eventually needed surgery that ended his season. He spent the offseason rehabbing that shoulder and was supposed to be ready for training camp before the pectoral injury pushed everything back by seven weeks.
Now he’s healthy enough to go. The Eagles trust the medical side of it, and Greenard only has to build back into game shape from here.
The Pro Bowl version may not show up until midseason, but that’s part of the plan. For now, the Eagles just need him on the field.
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For the Eagles, it turns what looked like a tricky early-season road game into a chance to stack a win and keep momentum rolling. Chicago is still a place where road trips can get messy, but the quarterback situation changes everything, and Philadelphia will have an opportunity to make the most of it if it handles business the way a contender should. [Read more 🡒]