While Miles Sanders cooks, AJ Brown finds a silver lining in the Eagles’ loss
Arlington, Texas – The ball exploded, and Miles Sanders could hear the roar of the crowd as he dived in behind it, knowing the crowd’s euphoria meant he had turned the ball over at the worst time ever.
So Sanders lay face down on the AT&T court floor, fist bumped and, with 2:07 left, drop the Eagles with a field goal. Then he came to the sideline, hands on his helmet, and bowed in disgust when his teammates came to console him.
“I have to hold the rock,” Sanders told Delawareonline.com/Delaware News Journal after the game. “It’s hard to win when you get 4 turnovers… We all made mistakes. Self-inflicted wounds, and I’m included in that.”
Pick your fault to blame for the Eagles’ 40-34 loss to the Cowboys on Saturday. Surely there were a lot of them. Along with the four turnovers, there was a critical error by the defense that allowed Dak Prescott’s 52-yard completion to TY Hilton on 3rd-and-30 midway through the fourth quarter, leading the Eagles with a touchdown run.
Darius Slay had cover under him, and Josiah Scott was deeply late to help.
“We definitely should have stopped them there,” defensive end Josh Sweet said. “I don’t want to say it’s taken for granted, but come on now. Yeah, that was disappointing… We felt unstoppable at this point. He just let the air out. The page itself, every play really. We’ll all bounce back.”
So it seemed odd when Eagles wide receiver AJ Brown said this: “It’s not a loss,” before adding, “I’m kind of glad we got through that. We’re still growing. Every drive counts. That’s what it’s going to be like in the playoffs. I think.” Just having that experience now, I think it means a lot.”
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Of course, if it were the playoffs, the Eagles would take an NFL-best 13-2 record and go home. As it stands, their ceremony, both for the NFC East division title and the #1 seed in the NFC playoffs, with the bye week that comes with it, has been pushed back a week.
The Eagles could clinch both with one win or another loss for the Cowboys in their final two regular season games.
Brown was not wrong.
After all, the Eagles were unstoppable offensively, and that was with backup quarterback Gardner Minshew making his first start of the season. Minshew threw for 355 yards and two touchdowns – and two interceptions.
Before that, the Eagles were unstoppable with Jalen Hurts at quarterback. Hurts is a leading MVP candidate. Hurts, who has a sprained shoulder, will likely not play again until the playoffs.
So it’s about the vultures, as Mincio said: “At the end of the day, you can’t stop yourself.”
The Cowboys certainly didn’t stop the Eagles because the Eagles never gave chase. Each drive ended in a touchdown, field goal – or turnover.
And this is perhaps the most impressive stat: Brown had 103 receiving yards and DeVonta Smith had 113 yards and two touchdowns. It is the third time the Eagles have had two wide receivers exceed 100 yards in the same game.
Before this season, you’ll have to go back to 2013 for the last time the Eagles happened even once.
Brown and Smith also became the first Eagles receiving duo to surpass 1,000 receiving yards in the same season.
Sanders also rushes for over 1,000 yards, and Hurts has 747 yards on the ground.
So yeah, Brown isn’t lamenting anything that happened on Saturday. Not even the last play of the game, Mingyu’s desperation fourth-and-ten pass to the end zone that touched away from Brown, who admitted he was watching defenders to get a gauge of when he should turn the ball over.
“I was running to (the defenders) thinking someone was going to turn around to at least try to bring him down,” Brown said. “But nobody did.”
Brown wasn’t angry, far from it.
“It was probably one of the most fun games I’ve been a part of,” he said.
When asked why, he replied: “It was a heavy fight. These are the games we live for, a game on the line, we had a chance. The ball is in our hands. It’s what you dreamed about as a kid. But there’s a lot to learn from it. No need to be Frustrating. That’s a learning experience out there. That’s not a loss. It’s a learning experience.”
Some of these lessons are clear. Sanders was confused. Minshew’s second interceptions were on passes intended for Quiz Watkins, both of which were taken away by a defenseman; and a botched handoff between Minshaw and return to Boston Scott.
The Cowboys turned those four turnovers into 20 points, more than enough to make up for a Sweet 6 pick early in the game that gave the Eagles a 10-0 lead.
And of course there was the thirty-third conversion.
“I used to say to the guys who come out at halftime, ‘Every drive counts,'” Brown said. Every leadership matters. Sometimes, we flip the ball or fumble with it. You can’t do that in the playoffs. You have to put teams like this apart.”
The Eagles can still turn away any team. They know it, and so do the cowboys. So if those two teams meet again, say at the end of January with a trip to the Super Bowl on the line, maybe the lessons learned from the painful loss will pay off.
Even Sanders knows this from his disgust.
“Without the twists and turns, I think we’d have a different conversation,” Sanders said. “We’re just letting this one slip by.”
Contact Martin Frank at mfrank@delawareonline.com. Follow us on Twitter @Mfranknfl.
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