The Philadelphia Eagles are preparing to face off for the second time this season with NFC East foes, the Dallas Cowboys, on Sunday night in a nationally televised game.
The Eagles were able to walk away from the previous meeting with a 33-10 victory that saw Philly rack up 464 yards offensively and smother the Dallas attack in a surprisingly effective manner. But a healthier Tony Romo and a rested Cowboys team should make this affair much more difficult, especially for an Eagles team that was absolutely trounced by the Seattle Seahawks last week -- a trouncing which was due in large part to an almost unbelievably abysmal performance by quarterback Mark Sanchez and the Philly offense.
While Sanchez and Co. will look to get things back on track against Dallas, there is no disputing the fact that the Eagles offense has looked different since Nick Foles got injured during a game against the Houston Texans. It hasn't looked bad or worse under Sanchez -- though it did look downright awful against Seattle -- just different.
And despite coach Chip Kelly's protestation to the opposite, there have been several sources of confirmation of this change.
"Last year, we got man-to-man single-high safety [coverage] every single game and teams are playing us a little bit differently this year," wide receiver Riley Cooper said, per Geoff Mosher of CSNPhilly.com. "We're getting a majority of zone. That is what we are getting.
"So it is tough to get past that for the deep balls. Those deep balls teams are taken away so we've got to kind of come at them a little bit differently. Dink and dunk, get the run game going."
Though Cooper's comment points more toward the difference between last year and this year, with Nick Foles at the helm for the first portion of this season the offense led the league in pass plays of 50 or more yards. Since Sanchez has taken over, there has been only one pass play of more than 50 yards in his 194 attempts.
Meanwhile, one of the Seahawks defensive players who had a direct hand in limiting the fast-paced Eagles offense to just 14 points and 45 total plays from scrimmage, said that the Philly offense has become both basic and predictable.
"I don't think there's any secret," Seahwaks middle linebacker Bobby Wagner said to ESPN.com. "There was a lot of talk about their fast-paced offense, but it doesn't matter. No matter how fast they ran a play, we were just on it. We knew what plays were coming and it's a pretty basic offense. Their offense is kind of predictable. They have a lot of plays where they can only run one way. We were ready for everything they had."
Kelly has said in the past that what he's implemented for the Eagles offensively isn't anything ground breaking -- they simply execute better than their opponent and use their speed and conditioning to wear them down over the course of a game.
"No, we just need to execute," Kelly said, per Sheil Kapadia of PhillyMag.com, when asked if there was anything he would have done differently against the Seahawks given the chance. "When you go back through it, they do a good job. They don't fool you with anything they do.
"They line up and play football and they are really, really good at doing that. You don't go back and look at it and say, 'Hey, we should have run trap or we should have run this scheme.' It's 'they executed and we didn't execute.'"
Execution or not, there is no doubting that the Eagles offense looks different with Sanchez under center -- or, more accurately, a few yards behind center -- than it does with Foles.
It remains to be seen if Sanchez can right the offensive ship this weekend against the Dallas Cowboys and, looking further ahead, if Foles will resume the starting role once he returns from injury.
