PHILADELPHIA — College powers schedule games like these in September. Some outclassed team comes to town for the privilege of getting obliterated in service of the powerhouse’s sharpening of its process. The blowout is celebrated by the home crowd, but it is more appreciated for an avoidance of the alternative.
The Philadelphia Eagles did exactly what they should have done to the Las Vegas Raiders. The Eagles pummeled them like a Sunday-morning snowplow. They humiliated a now-2-12 AFC bottom-feeder in a 31-0 beatdown to affirm what the Eagles’ three-game losing streak did not: the Eagles are a team that belongs to an elite tier. At 9-5, they are now two games away from clinching the first consecutive NFC East title since 2004.
“Just thankful for that,” said Brandon Graham, who, with two sacks at age 37, became the eldest Eagle in history to record a sack. “Nobody turned on each other. Nobody wavered. Everybody just continued to keep pressing, bringing the energy, and today it was good collectively.”
Make no mistake. The Eagles relished this win. They needed to. A locker room that steered clear of turmoil no longer needed an inflatable “Positivity Bunny” to boost morale. The defense danced after Zack Baun snagged his career-high second interception of the season. Dallas Goedert strutted past the pylon on his second touchdown reception. Even the ever-stoic Jalen Hurts emphatically pumped his fist after striking A.J. Brown for a 27-yard touchdown to set the final score.
“We just wanted to get a win,” Saquon Barkley said. “It don’t really matter how it looked.”
Such comments require context. Because it has mattered how it’s looked. The Eagles entered the weekend with a historically disjointed offense that operated at peak efficiency while running the ball a season-high 47 times for 183 yards against the Raiders’ bottom-10 defense. The offensive line mostly controlled the trenches in ways they hadn’t. Interior push on shotgun runs. Pulling guards on under-center runs. Outside zone concepts. The run-oriented approach enacted a play-action-heavy passing game in which Hurts completed 12 of 15 passes for 175 yards and three touchdowns.
“Once they feel like we’re trying to run the ball, that’s when they gotta play it differently,” right tackle Fred Johnson said. “And that’s when we capitalize off that.”
Sounds like 2024, doesn’t it? Sounds like the Eagles most often succeed offensively when they demand defensive attention with their run game, opening up wide-open zones for tight ends and one-on-one matchups for receivers. The Eagles’ 30 under-center plays against the Raiders were their most in any regular-season or playoff game since Nick Sirianni was hired as head coach in 2021. But Sirianni would not extrapolate Sunday’s success to any future game plans.
“Guys, every game calls for something a little bit different,” Sirianni said. “Obviously, we were successful, and were in front of the sticks and able to convert on third down. When you get drives going and you convert on third down and are explosive, take care of the football, good things happen.”
The majority of Philadelphia’s preceding game plans struggled in each of those phases. They entered the weekend ranked 28th in third-down conversions (34.2), 17th in runs of 10-plus yards (39), 15th in passes of 16-plus yards (59) and ninth in turnover margin (+3) after turning it over five times in a pass-oriented approach against the Los Angeles Chargers.
Is Sunday not how the Eagles play best? Their offense seized a 10-0 first-quarter lead in a three-drive sequence that included a season-high 11 under-center snaps, then commanded time of possession 39:25 to 20:35 in conjunction with a dominant defense that secured the team’s first shutout since 2018 and surrendered the fewest total yards (75) by an Eagles defense since a Dec. 4, 1955 win over the Chicago Cardinals (49).
“I think it’s just an evolving thing of what works game to game,” left guard Landon Dickerson said. “The same thing’s not gonna work every game.”
There are indeed isolated reasons that served the Eagles’ offensive approach against the Raiders. Three inches of snow fell upon Lincoln Financial Field by sunrise. Both teams faced northwest winds that reached 20 mph. Neither condition is favorable to the passing game. “It’s not throwing inside,” Hurts said. The Raiders also entered the weekend with a rush defense that logged successful plays in terms of EPA at the NFL’s fourth-lowest rate (56.3), per TruMedia.
Still, the Eagles are 4-0 this season when they run 20 or more plays from under-center. They averaged 21 under-center plays during the four-game win streak that preceded their offensive drought. They turned to a pass-oriented approach in last week’s loss against the Los Angeles Chargers, and Hurts threw his career-high fourth interception on the final play of overtime.
Saquon Barkley had 78 yards rushing and a touchdown against the Raiders. (Bill Streicher / Imagn Images)
“We had a mindset and we stuck to it,” said Barkley, who finished with 22 carries for 78 yards and a touchdown. “We didn’t let the defense dictate what we do, and you could feel it. I still believe we have a great offensive line. I know we still have a great offensive line. And if you keep continuing to give them opportunities to have those big jokers up there, lean on those guys up front, stuff is going to open up. And when we get our running game going, even though it’s not always going to be ripping 20-plus runs, it just opens up everything.”
Sunday’s game plan staged a rebound game for Hurts, whose seven rushes for 39 yards also embodied an uptick in the overall run game. On Wednesday, Sirianni was asked during his weekly radio appearance on 94.1 WIP if Hurts would be benched this season. Sirianni did sub in backup Tanner McKee against the Raiders — just after Hurts amassed a near-perfect 154.9 passer rating by the start of the fourth quarter. Throughout the week, Hurts was notably accountable after arguably the worst start of his career.
“Responded with a win,” Hurts said.
There is some wisdom in not making a shutout win over a hapless team competing for the No. 1 overall pick the allegorical standard for future offensive play. The Eagles failed to establish the run against more formidable defensive fronts. It is a faulty syllogism to suggest Sunday’s performance alone means a similar game plan will succeed when the Eagles face an actual challenger in the playoffs. But at the very least, the blowout win shows that Sirianni and first-time offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo’s system is functional when the Eagles are clearly the superior team.
That is a bar the 2023 Eagles did not clear. In a three-game stretch that included two games against the New York Giants and one against the Arizona Cardinals (both teams finished with a combined 10-24 record), the Eagles’ offense did not cure its stagnation and the Eagles lost two of those three games. That continued dysfunction stirred more of the frustrations behind the scenes, while functionally eliminating Philadelphia’s shot at homefield advantage.
The 2025 Eagles have only just now entered their first true tune-up sequence of the season. The Raiders entered the weekend with a .154 win percentage that was tied for the NFL’s worst. On Saturday, the Eagles will play the first of two games against the Washington Commanders, whose .231 win percentage ranks 25th. The Buffalo Bills and their sixth-ranked .692 win percentage represent the only true contender remaining on the Eagles’ schedule. They can sharpen their system in this final stretch.
Said Johnson: “I think we did good. I think we mixed it up a lot, trying to get things going, trying to get this offense the spark that we’ve been searching for so long.”
Said left tackle Jordan Mailata: “It just allows us to keep building off all the good stuff that we did today. There were some stuff that we need to work on, but I think the positive outweighed the negative. So building blocks — for sure, we can definitely do that to complement some of the good stuff that we did.”
The “Positivity Bunny” is now seven days dead. The Eagles now have the much-needed on-field success to fuel their confidence.
“It’s always a good feeling when you win,” Barkley said. “I feel like we got caught up in stuff that doesn’t matter. Only thing that matters is winning football.”