The end-of-season struggles of the Philadelphia Eagles have been well documented, playing a big role in the franchise losing five out of its last six games coming into the postseason.
Unfortunately for Eagles fans, those struggles continued throughout the first half of Monday’s Wild Card matchup with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The Buccaneers’ offense got off to a hot start on Monday night, getting on the board early with a field goal on their first possession of the game.
Their second offensive drive later in the quarter went even better, aided by the Eagles’ defense simply struggling to wrap up whatsoever.
Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield was able to find David Moore wide open down the field. Moore then proceeded to run 26 yards after making the catch, avoiding four Eagles defenders who were all unable to get him to the ground, for a 44-yard touchdown to get out to a 10-0 lead.
ESPN’s Joe Buck summed things up perfectly after Moore got into the endzone, calling out the Eagles’ poor tackling after the play.
“And so far the tackling for the Eagles in their secondary has been awful.”
Fans watching at home wholeheartedly agreed with Buck, blasting their defensive effort on social media.
It was far from just this play from the Eagles’ defense where they were missing tackles. Several other plays in the first half saw the Buccaneers gaining key yards from broken tackles.
Buck yet again addressed the Eagles’ continued issues yet again in the second quarter.
“Sorry to keep saying the same thing,” said Buck. “But I keep seeing the same thing. Talk about missed tackles. We have seen it since the start.”
The Eagles made a pretty drastic midseason change on the defensive side of the ball to help fix things, making senior defensive assistant Matt Patricia the defensive play-caller instead of defensive coordinator Sean Desai.
Thus far, the change has had very little positive impact. And at some point, a real question needs to be made on whether it is just the players on the field that are at fault here.
Regardless, the defense will certainly need to tackle far better than this throughout this game if they want to have any chance of defeating the Buccaneers.
About Reice Shipley
Reice Shipley is a staff writer for Comeback Media that graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in Sports Media. He previously worked at Barrett Sports Media and is a fan of all things Syracuse sports.