How Nick Sirianni plans to fix Eagles' tackling woes after disaster in Tampa
The Eagles missed a lot of tackles on Sunday.
How many?
During our postgame Eagle Eye podcast, when my colleague Reuben Frank estimated they missed 20, I kind of chuckled. No way they missed that many, right?
Well ... they were close. In their 33-16 loss to the Buccaneers, the Eagles were charged with 16 missed tackles that resulted in 105 extra yards, per NFL Next Gen Stats.
Those 105 extra yards are the second-most given up by a team in one game this season. And it's not like this is a new problem. The Eagles gave up 92 extra yards in Week 1 against the Packers in São Paulo. But at least that game was played on a bad field.
What the heck happened on Sunday? It was a troubling game.
As the Eagles enter their Week 5 bye week, their coaches have plenty to work on. One of those things will be figuring out how to get the defense to tackle better.
"I think what I'll do definitely this week is, 'OK, let's look at, we know that the issue – what are the common themes of the tackles we're missing?'" Sirianni said. "And I've got a pretty good idea what they are. How do we simulate that in drills? How do we show it in meetings, from around the league, from us, so you emphasis it? And that will be the process of what we go through this week.
"But with the amount of tackles we missed in this last game, it led to a lot of extra yards by them. And you're going to miss a couple tackles each game, but that wasn't to our standard. And there were different circumstances of why that we need to get corrected. And any time I talk about – I'm so passionate about details and fundamentals that that hurts me when we don't tackle well. Because I know how much time we put into it."
The biggest offender against the Buccaneers was Nakobe Dean, who was charged with five missed tackles. Safety Reed Blankenship had three before he left with an illness.
Because missed tackles are a subjective stat, the number is going to vary from site to site. While Next Gen Stats charged the Eagles with 16, ProFootballFocus had the Eagles with 10. That's not very good either, obviously.
The frustrating thing is that the Eagles tackled very well in their Week 3 win over the Saints, when they had just three missed tackles, per Next Gen Stats. They converted on 94.7% of their tackling opportunities in the big win in New Orleans.
Perhaps being in their base defense to match the Saints' offense helped shore up tackling. Because Weeks 1-2 weren't great either. The Eagles had 25 missed tackles through two weeks, which was fifth most in the NFL.
They have now missed 44 tackles this season.
As the Eagles work to fix a lot of issues over the bye week, the tackling issue has to be near the top of the list.
"I'm going to, again, first and foremost say, 'What did I not do well enough?'" Sirianni said. "The things I'm talking about to you guys are the things I didn't do well enough, and how do we correct that from a coaching standpoint to get better. And then the different things we do fundamentally is going to be big."
