Nothing was uglier than watching the Philadelphia Eagles' offense be dragged through the rain in the second half of the 13-12 win over the Buffalo Bills in Week 17.
After 13 points and 174 yards in the first half, the Eagles' offense dropped to just 16 yards on 18 plays in the second half to barely sneak by with the victory. Reporters asked Eagles offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo about it during his press conference. He knew exactly what the problem was, but wasn't quite clear on the solution.
"When you look at it, is the amount of drives we had and plays and some of the starting positions, it was the first down thing again," Patullo said via The Athletic's Zach Berman. "We had four drives where we had inefficient first downs, put us in four second-and-longs, and then from that, we were in three third-and-longs. When you're doing that, when that's happening, it's going to be very hard to move the ball. That's the unfortunate part of it. We had the one backed up drive from the minus one, we have to get it out. We ran again on second down; we didn't get much. Then third down, we had some pressure and that was a punt.
"When you look at those drives, it gets frustrating. We need one play. All we need is one spark, one thing to get those things going, and we're out of it."
"Those are the frustrating pieces that we're looking at as a staff. How do we get out of those? What do we need to do better as a coaching staff? How do we execute better? Because really, it's not just one person, one thing, one play style, one call. It's everything. We've got to look at everything."
Patullo is not exactly going to ease Eagles fans' minds with his response
The common denominator with the second half was that Patullo was quick to go straight to runs on first and second down on the first two plays of the drive. That set the Eagles' offense back on third down and long, making it impossible to get a big passing play in the weather.
This is a classic case of Patullo getting too conservative with his play-calling and almost costing his team another game. It's okay to run on first down and run the ball more when the weather is bad, but there needs to be more creativity in the plays.
Running more play-action bootlegs with Jalen Hurts or more plays under center would have helped the Eagles out. They completely abandoned what worked the best for them over the last two weeks, and it showed how much it hurt their offense time and time again.
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Eagles fans want to believe that Patullo is going to get better, but 16 games in, and it's still embarrassingly bad, so there's no longer any reason to defend a guy who is one foot out the door after the season. He's a nice guy, and maybe there's a spot for him on the coaching staff, but he shouldn't be the offensive coordinator and play caller in 2026.