Philadelphia Eagles: Carson Wentz deserves to be questioned after loss

Following Sunday’s embarrassing 37-10 defeat in Dallas, Philadelphia Eagles starting quarterback Carson Wentz deserves his share of the blame for the state of the team.

We are nearly three and a half years into the Carson Wentz era for the Philadelphia Eagles, and by my count, he has played like an elite quarterback for about two-thirds of a season.

Not good.

The Eagles have too many problems to list at the moment, and Wentz frankly isn’t even one of the greatest concerns. But when you pin your hopes so heavily on a player like the Eagles have done with him, it can’t feel like anything but a horrible letdown to this point.

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Statistics aren’t everything, and quarterbacks on losing teams can actually tend to pile up some good numbers because teams are forced to throw the ball all the time when they are constantly losing. But, even so, you’d expect that a supposedly healthy Wentz would be able to rank among the league leaders after seven weeks of the 2019 NFL season.

But he doesn’t even crack the top ten in either completions or passing yardage. And while blame also needs to be assigned to receivers dropping passing and an offensive line that has hung Wentz out to dry an unacceptable amount of times, it is truly starting to feel like we have been sold a bill of goods about this guy.

There’s no shame in being a solid quarterback for a decade or so. Just ask Matt Stafford and others of his ilk who clearly have talent but have never won anything. Yet, Wentz was supposed to be much more than this.

Last December, the Eagles had a huge Week 14 showdown against the Dallas Cowboys. Wentz’s numbers looked acceptable enough, but he and the club ultimately failed in a 29-23 loss that seemingly ended their playoff hopes.

Little did we know that it would be Wentz’s last action of the season, as we were informed afterwards about a lingering back injury that he had been playing through. Thank goodness Nick Foles came to the rescue again to lead the team back to the postseason, which caused some serious controversy around town.

Still, sane Eagles fans had to admit that Wentz was the future of the club. He had to be. The team even dealt Foles away, mostly for salary cap concerns, but ostensibly so that Wentz would no longer have to look over his shoulder. The team was going to sink or swim with him. It’s the way it needed to be for this grand experiment to work.

And that’s why it’s so disappointing that, seemingly every chance he gets to prove how good he truly is, Wentz wilts.

Make no mistake, a 37-10 blowout is a total team loss. Many may even say that Wentz is actually the only thing that the Eagles have going for them right now and that they clearly need to put a better team around him to give him every chance to succeed. They aren’t necessarily wrong.

But it’s never going to be perfect. The best of the best find ways to win in big spots, and Wentz simply hasn’t done that yet.

I don’t think that Howie Roseman and company have drafted well at all in recent years, which is a huge detriment to the club. And it feels like Doug Pederson has somehow regressed as a coach. Maybe the end result is that the Eagles simply aren’t good, and Wentz isn’t taking them anywhere until some serious changes are made to the rest of the team.

Regardless of all this, the offense under Wentz never seems capable of putting a complete game together, which feels like an underachievement week in and week out.

But maybe it’s really not. Maybe our expectations should just be way less than we thought they should be.

Wentz still has time to find his game, but with every missed opportunity, the window seems to close just a tiny bit more.

Next. Scapegoating Orlando Scandrick feels reactionary. dark

Are these just the overreactions of a crestfallen Philadelphia Eagles fan? Perhaps, but you’re kidding yourself if you think that Carson Wentz is fully holding up his end of the bargain right now.

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