Don't Stop Believing in Carson Wentz
Coming into Thursday’s empty pinata of a game against the Giants, the only quarterback with less value on a play-to-play basis than Daniel Jones, according to Football Outsiders’ Defensive-adjusted Value Over Average metric, was Carson Wentz.
Wentz had the fifth-worst passer rating of any quarterback in the NFL. He had the sixth-lowest percentage of throws that fell below his expected completion rate. His Bad Throw percentage had never been higher. His on-target passing percentage had never been lower. He led the league in interceptions and chucked another ill-advised pick in the second quarter.
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These are typically numbers that we should (and do) hold dear. Born out over the course of a season, they can almost always tell the story of good quarterbacks who don’t get enough recognition and bad quarterbacks who are simply riding on the back of name recognition or a generationally talented defense and why middling quarterbacks remain middling quarterbacks.
But we’re all allowed an episode of blind defiance in the face of great information every now and then (just ask anyone in the highest reaches of our society). And if the Eagles are able to regain some semblance of health, it wouldn’t surprise us to see Wentz become the formidable, division-winning quarterback we’d projected him to be at the outset of the season. In short: We should not be peering at the sideline wishing Jalen Hurts would warm up. We should not be reading scouting reports on draft-eligible quarterbacks in 2020 in case this freefall continues. We should not take the mountain of evidence suggesting Wentz is playing poorly as a guarantee that this will always be so.
While there may not be anything beautiful about this season, nothing aesthetically pleasing about his game amid a season that promised to be so much more, Thursday night showed a quarterback who can still instinctively make perfect throws against tight coverage. A quarterback who can drop a pinpoint floater in the corner of the end zone only to have it drop untouched through the hands of a former sixth-round pick out of Old Dominion, who happens to be Wentz’s most productive receiver at the moment. Maybe—and especially Thursday—we had to squint to see it sometimes; tilt the screen sideways and imagine what it was actually supposed to look like, especially when Wentz was crawling out of a 6-of-18 stretch.
The Eagles have rotated through twenty different offensive starters and seven different versions of their offensive line through seven weeks, including two on Thursday following an early-game injury to Lane Johnson. Zach Ertz is not on the field. Alshon Jeffery is not on the field. Jalen Reagor is not on the field. DeSean Jackson returned on a pitch count. The Eagles’ scheme is in quicksand, lodged somewhere between the salvageable parts of three years ago and where it’s eventually going once Doug Pederson’s roster is healthy enough to pave a clear direction toward something resembling the more potent offenses in the NFL right now.
And yet, when Wentz rolls out of the pocket with 1:55 remaining, down by five points and connects with his third string tight end for a 30-yard gain, we’re quick to rationalize it as a fluke play against a middling defense. When Wentz floats a wheel route to his 5-foot-6 running back over the shoulder of Jabrill Peppers to win the game, the instinct is to complement the hands and balletic foot placement of Boston Scott (which was also great).
The damning thing about some of the numbers is how much better contextualized they are now than they were 20 years ago. ESPN’s Total QBR metric, which, before Thursday night had Wentz as the 25th-best quarterback in the league behind Jones, takes into account so many factors like receiver effort, down, distance, situation, protection and defense. It feels helpless to argue that, in some fleeting moment we saw against the 1-5 Giants that we should reconsider everything we’re being told about Wentz right now. But it’s also hard not to overlay some of the best moments we’re seeing atop an Eagles roster that is functional and somewhat familiar over the second half of the season and wonder where he might end up in some of those statistical categories at season’s end.
