One of those plays where the more you watch the replay, the more you just don’t believe he didn’t catch it.
Advertisement
Maybe they have something here.
Bears quarterback Jay Cutler left Monday night’s game with a hand injury, making it an even half-dozen Chicago players forced out against the Philadelphia Eagles.
On a weekend when former Bears’ wide receiver Brandon Marshall, running back Matt Forte and tight end Martellus Bennett put up sizeable numbers for their new teams, the Bears, outside of Jeffery and Royal on punt return, barely had a pulse.
Carson Wentz, Philadelphia Eagles – The rookie played well again and is now 2-0 to start his young and promising career.
Fox on being 0-2: “It’s two games and we have 14 games left”.
Cutler completed 12 of 17 passes for 157 yards and one interception and lost a fumble. On the next play, Wentz threw a quick pass to Trey Burton, who got into the end zone.
Philadelphia quarterback Carson Wentz tries to get past Chicago linebacker Sam Acho. He hit a 54-yarder in 2013.
Wentz still finished 21 for 34 for 190 yards with one touchdown and no interceptions. It was a four-point drop. After dazzling in his National Football League debut with 278 yards and a 101.0 passer rating at home against perhaps the NFL’s worst team, the Browns, Wentz came out firing on his first six short pass attempts – completing all six – to lead Philadelphia to a field goal on his first series. The Eagles were unbalanced in the first half, throwing on 24 of 35 plays.
He becomes the first Eagles head coach in the Super Bowl Era to win his first two games with the team.
“Throughout the week, I just realized I’m going back to kind of where my life changed so to speak”, Wentz said.
Ironically, his most impressive plays of the night will look like Eagles’ failues on the stat sheet.
Chicago’s touchdown, a 1-yard run by Jeremy Langford, was set up on a 49-yard bomb from Cutler to Alshon Jeffery early in the second quarter. Jalen Mills was in coverage and couldn’t stay with the big receiver. That was their lone victory at Soldier Field last season.
On Monday night, Cutler was on the receiving end. That really flipped the game and ended it. Through two games, Wentz has yet to throw an interception. “And again, he took care of the football and stood in there and made some nice, tough throws”. With a struggling offensive line (hello, regressing Jason Kelce!), the run game needs work. The Eagles drove all the way to the 2-yard line, and Pederson kept his offense on the field on a fourth down.
“That’s what makes him a good pocket passer”, said Pederson.
“Visit TicketIQ to discover the lowest prices on Eagles tickets anywhere, zone-level ticket data and seat views from fans just like you!”. It’s a tiny sample size, but more than enough to surmise the game isn’t too big for Wentz. They gave him no-huddle to start the game and I thought he handled that pretty well. Whether it will cause him to miss time moving forward is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to imagine the team will be more competitive with anyone but Cutler under center for the foreseeable future. Pederson called them “week to week”.
Advertisement
It was Brian Hoyer’s game after that, and a Brian Hoyer-quarterbacked Bears would finally have the appropriate level of give-a-shit-aboutness, which is to say, very little at all.
