The Carson Wentz/Alshon Jeffrey pairing has gotten a ton of attention here in the Philly market. They've even gone so far as to graph each of their best routes and impressively enough both of their charts were nearly identical. Carson Wentz was most prolific last year on the routes that Alshon Jeffrey was the most prolific on. Those two seem to be a match made in heaven and Jeffrey made a circus catch on Thursday with a one handed grab of a ball in the back corner of the endzone and still got both of his feet down in bounds.
They've also compared the most successful routes of Jeffrey to the least successful defense by Josh Norman and found out that Alshon is best on the routes that Josh is worst at defending, so that matchup could be fun to watch. There's a lot of optimism in the Philly market about the coming season right now. The big thing with Jeffrey is keeping him healthy. The Sports Science guys in Philly are pretty good at that however, so with any luck we'll keep him healthy most of the year.
Little Donnell Pumphrey is also catching a lot of eyes in the OTA's. He's offically a running back but has been taking many of his reps as a wide receiver in the slot. He figures to be a wildcard matchup for defenses this year. By going with a two back set with Pumphrey as one of the backs paired with either LeGarrette Blount, the 250 lb wrecking ball, or Darren Sproles another small, fast back/receiver, you can give defenses all kinds of headaches. If defenses cheat the safeties up to stop Blount you can send Pumphrey out on a linebacker and there's no linebacker in the league who can match him speed wise. If the defense stays in a base defense with Sproles and Pumphrey in the game both can split out as receivers and you've suddenly got five receivers against four DB's. If they go to a nickel defense and you've got Blount in the backfield he can punish the smaller defenders on runs.
The reports out of the Eagles camp so far are all very optimistic. The new guys are looking good and everything sounds promising. Training camp opens the last week of July, so we'll start learning more then, but Derek Barnett is beating our best offensive tackles on a fairly routine basis, the new players we drafted, with one exception, the receiver Shelton Gibson who's been dropping way too many balls, are all getting raves from the players and coaches.
The only real question mark is still the cornerback position, but Rasul Douglas our third round pick has been stepping into a starting role and more than holding his own so far. Sidney Jones, our second round pick recovering from the torn Achilles may also be available from mid-season on. Patrick Robinson has come in intent on proving the skeptics wrong about him and we've got Jalen Mills who impressed the coaches last year.
This is about as deep an Eagles team as I can remember seeing. Oddly enough one of the more impressive guys in camp so far has been Matt McGloin who may be out-playing Nick Foles for that backup role. We're even three deep at quarterback in a league where a lot of teams barely have one competent starter.
It's almost like the stars all aligned for the Eagles this year. We needed wide receiver help but had little cap space. The league decided receivers weren't worth as much as they were being paid which dropped the price of a top of the line guy like Jeffrey down to where the Eagles could afford him. Chance Warmack, a 'sure thing' offensive linemen in the draft a few years ago is given up on by Tennessee and comes to Philly to reunite with his college coach who's convinced he can get him playing at a high level again. We've got two backup quarterbacks with playing experience. We were able to pick up a top 100 player in LeGarrette Blunt for next to nothing. Our kids are all looking good and we were able to both fill a need and get the best available player in most rounds.
It'll be fun to see what happens when the games start to matter, but right now there's reason for optimism in Philly.
Fly!!! Eagles!!! Fly!!!
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