Week 12 Game Changing Plays: Eagles Survive Again
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Eagles QB Jalen Hurts
This is beginning to become a habit.
For the fourth straight game, the Philadelphia Eagles pulled out a one-score win, as they continue to dodge pitfalls left and right on their way to an NFC best 10-1 record. For the third straight game, advanced statistics suggested that they shouldn’t have actually won the games in question, with DVOA’s Post Game Win Expectancy giving slight advantages to the Cowboys and Chiefs the past few weeks, and now watching them barely squeak past the Bills, even as Philadelphia has run the table against the lot of them. Well, their post game win expectancy might be low, but their post-game win total remains high and mighty, as the Eagles took advantage of Buffalo repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot to finish off a come-from-behind 37-34 victory in overtime.
This is really a glass half-full-type situation. We can talk about resiliency, about how the Eagles never give up even when the best teams in the league give them their best shot, and fire back with the most unstoppable play in football and a variety of different supporting strategies around it. We can talk about guts and stomps, and how truly great teams aren’t challenged as much as the Eagles are in the first place, and how the Eagles have yet to have one truly defining “we are the best” win this season. Honestly, where you come down on that probably depends, in part, on your vicinity to the Schuylkill River and your preference between cheesesteakes and cioppino more than anything else. Whatever may happen in the future, however, the Eagles have a firm grip atop the conference for the moment, and no amount of Monday Morning Quarterbacking will take that away from them.
We will get to just how the Eagles picked themselves up off the canvas and dodged the imploding Bills in a moment, but first, let’s look at some of the other game-changing plays from around Thanksgiving weekend.
The Zombie Team Thrives Again
The win ties the Broncos for the final wildcard spot in the AFC, though their 3-4 conference record currently has them out of the playoffs behind the Colts and Texans. Better than falling a game back, mind you! The Browns, meanwhile, dropped from the fifth seed to the sixth, now behind Pittsburgh in the division thanks to their pair of division losses. Stay tuned there.
A Side of Rice
A loss by the Chiefs would have knocked them down to fourth place, cost them control of the their own fate in the AFC, and even put the fate of the AFC West in question with the Broncos just a game back. Instead, they’re sitting high at second in the conference, with the clear inside lane to the top seed and the bye week, and look to have nothing serious to worry about until January. As for the Raiders, they needed an upset here to keep their season on life support. At 5-7, they’re toast.
Jessie Bates Goes Psycho on New Orleans
Football’s a team game, yadda yadda yadda. The Atlanta Falcons beat the New Orleans Saints in large part because free agent acquisition Jessie Bates decided they would. He had 12 tackles, including one that saved a touchdown in the third quarter and led to a New Orleans field goal. He also had this pick-6…
…and this forced fumble, both in the Red Zone.
The Falcons now sit atop the NFC South. At, uh, 5-6. Look, it’s a terrible division, but someone’s gotta win it. And a head-to-head victory over the previous division leader seems like a good way to start.
Kick Needed To Be A Little Bit Bigger in Texas
The most-anticipated game of the week was between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Houston Texans, and when was the last time you could make that claim? Just getting to this point is a moral victory for DeMeco Ryans and the Texans, but moral victories don’t count in the standings.
Texans fans are going to argue that part of their loss came from C.J. Stroud absorbing multiple Josh Allen sacks, and yes, those all played major roles throughout the game. A bigger part, though, was how Trevor Lawrence found ways to hit big pass after big pass — he complete seven of his 14 passes over 10 yards, going for 180 on the day. In the second half, that seemed to be all Calvin Ridley, who had five receptions for 89 yards and a score in the second half alone. That turned this game into a shootout.
But behind another 300-yard passing day from Stroud, the Texans came back from a 24-14 deficit, scoring a touchdown to make things a one score game and forcing a punt to get the ball back with three minutes left needing a field goal to tie. And while they moved the ball into Jaguars territory, a pair of Josh Allen sacks ended up forcing them into a difficult decision. 4th-and-12 at the Jacksonville 39. Do you have your rookie quarterback go for the game right then and there? Or do you let your kicker, who has already missed a 50-yarder today, launch a game-tying 58-yard kick? The models sided with the kicker. ESPN said this was a clear kick situation, with a +13.1% win percentage boost from attempting the field goal. It was, in their estimation, basically a 50/50 chance for the kick to be made, and only about a 25/75 chance to convert the first down; 12 yards was just too tall an ask. And so Matt Amendola came out, put everything he had into it…
Just short.
The win likely gives the Jaguars the division, though nothing’s been mathematically decided. A loss would have had Jacksonville and Houston tied at 7-4, with Houston having the season sweep over the Jaguars. Instead, the Jaguars now have a two-game lead on the field, currently hold the tiebreaker over every other team in the division, and look to have things more or less wrapped up. As for Houston, rather than being in fourth place in the conference, they’re in eighth, missing out on the playoffs at the moment thanks to their head-to-head loss to Indianapolis back in Week 2. There’s still plenty of time for them to make a run, but they’re in a dogfight now.
Fly, Eagles, Fly
And so we come back to the Eagles and the Bills. Let us enter the fourth quarter, with Buffalo holding on to a 24-21 lead. By this point, the Bills had already missed a couple field goals and let Philadelphia recover from a 17-7 halftime deficit. In the DVOA Discord server, we were commenting how it felt like Buffalo needed to score on every possession, as it didn’t seem likely that they would stop the Eagles ever again. Things did not, shall we say, proceed in that direction, as Bad Josh Allen reared his head once again.
Buffalo got the ball back with 7:06 remaining, and basically marched at the exact wrong pace. You either want to score quickly, so you have time for another possession if Philadelphia scores, or you want to score with the clock at 0:00. With four straight runs, it looked like they were going for the latter, but Allen ended up finding Gabe Davis in the end zone with 1:52 left to go up 31-28. I’ll never knock a trailing team for scoring go ahead points, but now you’ve basically locked yourself into needing a defensive stop, when the defense has been sliding around throughout the second half. Unfortunate!
The Eagles got into Buffalo territory in four plays, with both time outs remaining. Both A.J. Brown, Kenneth Gainwell, and Devonta Smith caught big passes, the drive was moving, and then…they just stopped. Yes, they suffered a pair of very badly timed Jason Kelce false starts. But they also started running quarterback draws and short passes, seemingly happy to settle for the 59-yard Jake Elliott field goal attempt. We just saw that go wrong in Houston earlier in the day, and that was in much better conditions! Surely, the Eagles would be punished for their hubris…
Well, alright then. Tie ball game.
Buffalo, rather foolishly, used their second time out to try to ice Jake Elliott. Well, they still had one time out left and 20 seconds; enough time to run a deep shot or two to Stefon Diggs and try to win this thing in regulation. Instead, they simply kneeled, giving up on a possession in a 31-31 ballgame. The commentary booth praised them for not taking a risk; a pick-six or a sack-fumble likely gives Philly the win. Sure, but a field goal gives you the win! And you’re running the risk of losing the coin toss, seeing the Eagles march down the field and score, and never getting the ball back! Or, and I’m just spitballing here, getting the ball first in overtime, driving for a field goal, but having the game continue because of the overtime rules rather than it being a game-winner. Then, Philadelphia could march back down the field, score a touchdown and win the game. But what are the odds of that happening?
Buffalo’s overtime drive could have won it, but miscommunication sent a wide-open Gabriel Davis outside and Josh Allen’s pass inside on third-and-6, forcing the go-ahead field goal. The Eagles then got the ball and marched down the field, inside the red zone. There, Hurts saw the safeties abandoning the middle of the field, took the ball himself, and produced the biggest play of the season so far.
Ballgame. Eagles go to 10-1.
The Eagles would have been first in the NFC no matter what, but the situation now is entirely different. With a loss here, next week’s 49ers game would have been for first place in the conference. A loss there would have given San Francisco a one-game lead and the tiebreaker, putting Philadelphia in significant trouble. Now, even if the Eagles lose to the 49ers next week, they’ll still have a one-game against the 49ers, and could still match San Francisco the rest of the way to keep the bye week. That’s a crucial cushion down the stretch. And if they beat the 49ers? A three-game lead plus the tiebreaker is basically unassailable. The Eagles can basically finish the competitive portion of their regular season next week.
The Bills, meanwhile, aren’t quite dead. But the 7-5 Bills would be sitting in seventh place; the 6-6 Bills are in 10th and on extreme life support. They’re going to have to go 4-1 the rest of the way to have any sort of realistic shot; and can’t feel confident unless they run the table. They have burned through their entire margin for error, and for a team with that much variance, that’s a terrible position to be in. And now they’ve got to beat the Chiefs in two weeks. Best of luck with that!
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