Philadelphia Eagles: Andre Dillard joins Landon Dickerson on the COVID list

When the Philadelphia Eagles announced that Landon Dickerson was placed on the COVID list on Sunday, mere hours after clearing both Quez Watkins and Jason Huntley, it felt like a massive bummer.

I mean, the whole reason why the team’s Week 15 game was moved back two days was to give both teams time to heal up, not to lose even more players, right? Did the league really think more players wouldn’t miss time after watching double-digit players get added to the COVID list for the better part of a week?

*spoiler alert* that’s exactly what happened.

Almost 24 hours to the minute after Landon Dickerson was placed on the COVID list, and a few hours after Washington placed their own top guard, Brandon Scherff to their expansive list of ineligible players, the Philadelphia Eagles did it again by announcing that Andre Dillard, the team’s first-round-drafted left tackle has been placed in protocol and will miss the team’s Tuesday night game.

The Philadelphia Eagles’ depth chart will be tested in Week 15.

Heading into Sunday, the Philadelphia Eagles were in pretty good shape.

Sure, they had four guards on IR in Brandon Brooks, Isaac Seumalo, Jack Driscoll, and seldom-used practice squad signee Jack Anderson, but the unit that took the field in Week 13 – Jordan Mailata, Landon Dickerson, Jason Kelce, Nate Herbig, and Lane Johnson – meshed fairly well and likely could have finished out the season as one of the better offensive line units left standing.

Was depth an issue? Maybe a little bit, but between Sua Otepa, Andre Dillard, and Le’Raven Clark, the Eagles could have surely gotten by in any given game if a player like Kelce had to leave for a few snaps.

Sidebar: Hey Howie Roseman, please invest in a solid third-string center who can snap out of the shotgun. Nate Herbig is a solid reserve guard, but he’s not a center.

But with Dillard and Dickerson out? The Eagles’ depth chart will be severely tested.

Regardless of who the Eagles opt to start at left guard – probably Otepa – the team will have the following players available to go in their active roster, assuming no one else is added to the COVID list: Jordan Mailata, Jason Kelce, Nate Herbig, Lane Johnson, Sua Otepa, Brett Toth, and Le’Raven Clark. Factor in year two practice squad center Luke Juriga and once-promising Buffalo product Kayode Awosika, both of whom are on the practice squad, and the Eagles will surely have bodies to put on the field at every position, but not much in terms of proven depth.

But hey, how does depth become proven? By actually taking the field and playing.

Between Otepa, Toth, Clark, Juriga, and Awosika, the team’s current reserve quintet has appeared in 89 combined games with 18 starts. While most of those belong to Clark, who probably isn’t playing guard anytime soon, Juriga, Toth, and Otepa all have at least 10 games of experience under their belts with the Eagles, even if most of those games comprise of playing on special teams.

Needless to say, if disaster strikes and the Eagles suffer another injury, it obviously won’t be ideal, but it won’t be catastrophic either, especially with Jeff Stoutland in coordinating the run game.

As fans have seen firsthand, when a COVID outbreak hits a team, it usually impacts players in the same position grouping disproportionately because of their frequent and close approximation. While it won’t be a lot of fun to see the Philadelphia Eagles trot out a line without Andre Dillard and Landon Dickerson, let’s hope they are the only players affected by this current outbreak, for theirs and everyone else’s sake.