Three Weeks and Counting Until the Eagles Season Opener

PHILADELPHIA - Three weeks to go until the regular season opens, and there is still plenty of work to be done for the Eagles, and most certainly every other NFL team, too.

For the Eagles, the opener means a trip to Landover, Md., on Sept. 13 to play a Washington team that no longer has a nickname, unless you count "Football Team" as the nickname.

Whatever the name, it will be hard to know what to expect from any team with an offseason unlike any other due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The train is moving,” said cornerback Cre’Von LeBlanc following Sunday’s practice. “We’re only 21 days til kickoff so we have to keep our foot on the gas and keep it rolling.”

Balancing the urgency brought on by an abbreviated training camp that didn’t allow pads for the first time until Aug. 17 with practicing the correct way and not getting sloppy ism no doubt, challenging.

“We’re only a handful of practices in so it feels like it’s still early in training camp, but things are obviously different this year,” said quarterback Carson Wentz prior to Sunday morning’s practice. “We also recognize that everyone’s going through this same kind of situation right now.

“It’s a fine line of handling that but also continuing to emphasize to everybody, especially the young guys, that we don’t have a lot of time here. We have to really focus and hone our crafts to be ready a couple weeks from now.”

LeBlanc had an interesting way to describe what players should be doing as the countdown to kickoff hit 21 days.

“That playbook has to be your girlfriend, your friend, everything right now,” he said. “If you don’t know that, you can’t play. If you know that you’ll start making plays or you will make plays in the future.”

It’s a crash-course in professional football for the 10 Eagles draft picks and the dozen or so other undrafted rookie free agents with the hope of avoiding a crash as the season gets underway sooner rather than later.

“When you think about 21 days, I think about ten days of camp left,” said head coach Doug Pederson prior to Sunday’s practice. “Then you're into game week and you're making some roster moves within the next ten to 14 days. It feels a little different, obviously. Things have moved along and kind of sped along.

“But this is everything we have anticipated. This has been my messaging to the team the whole time. Again, we continue to work every single day. I am pleased (with) where the team is at right now. But there's still some things that we have to work on this week in practice coming up in order to be fully prepared for that first week.”

The defense appeared ahead of the offense by a significant margin during Friday’s scrimmage, and that could be the case even as the season begins, and not just for the Eagles.

“I think that it's kind of like a baseball season where hitters are sometimes ahead of the pitchers early in the season until the pitchers get in their groove and their rhythm,” said Pederson. “Obviously with a couple of weeks of padded practices and being limited in what we can do, I think it's going to be that way, possibly early in the season.

“But one thing that we've got going for us here, and probably many teams around the league, is the veteran presence on offense or a staff that hasn't changed over a lot of terminology and a lot of things that we haven't - we've introduced some new concepts and some new things, but for the most part, 95 percent of our offense is in, and it's repetitive, so the guys can just get better at what we do. That's what we have to lean on probably early in the season until we catch our groove a little bit."

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