Eagles Will Exploit One Obvious Mismatch to Dominate Commanders

A playoff matchup, especially in the NFC Championship, is always going to be a totally different beast than a regular season game. And in the case of the Philadelphia Eagles vs. Washington Commanders matchup, that becomes particularly true when you consider that the Eagles were without their starting quarterback for a significant chunk of one of their two games earlier this season.

So much will be different on Sunday that it's hard to read too much into what happened in the teams' two previous meetings this season. But a closer look at that Week 16 showdown makes one thing abundantly clear:

The Eagles have every intention of exploiting one specific matchup against the Commanders defense, and that's going to be the key to the Philly offense completely rolling and bringing the Eagles to another Super Bowl.

Eagles vs Commanders Prediction: AJ Brown Will Expose One Defender in NFC Championship

AJ Brown has been a complete nonfactor through two playoff games this year for the Eagles, but his matchup with Marshon Lattimore can be the centerpiece of the Philly offense this week, and he should be in for one of his best games of the season.

Brown, who has a 60.5-yard over/under for receiving yards on FanDuel Sportsbook, has only 24 yards on 3 receptions combined this postseason. But as he continues to recover from that shoulder injury, he's going to be in for all the work he can handle this week. I said above that we can't read too much into Week 16, but first let's consider what we learned, and then we'll look at what that means in the NFC Championship.

What Happened Last Time?

Week 16 brought Brown's highest single-game target total. He was thrown to a whopping 15 times, though he converted that into a more standard "solid game" stat line: 8 receptions, 97 yards and a touchdown. When you consider that 14 of those 15 targets came from Kenny Pickett, however, you can forgive Brown for the relative inefficiency.

But it was especially noteworthy who Brown was being covered by when targeted.

The Commanders finally had Marshon Lattimore on the field, playing his second game with the team, and they completely changed how he'd been playing this season. With the New Orleans Saints he had lined up almost exclusively as the right cornerback. That was also the case in his Commanders debut in Week 15, with PFF crediting him with playing all 51 of his snaps on the right side.

Then in Week 16, that changed. He was following Brown around the field, playing 31 snaps at left cornerback and 29 at right corner. That reflects Brown's 32/28 split almost identically. And 10 of Brown's 15 targets came when covered by Lattimore. He had 5 receptions, 68 yards and his touchdown on those looks. Again, the efficiency leaves a lot to be desired, but a lot of that blame lands on Pickett. And if we go by PFF grade, which at the very least lets us separate out some of the responsibility, Brown had a solid 75.0 receiving grade, compared to 57.7 in coverage from Lattimore.

It's also not likely that this was just a case of a simplified Kenny Pickett gameplan — Hurts' first two targets of the game (two of his three non-throwaway pass attempts) were to Brown.

What Will Change This Time Around?

Commanders head coach Dan Quinn is a defensive mastermind. But the really tricky thing here is that he doesn't have a ton of options to make things different.

Say he decides that this matchup is too hard for Lattimore, and that the answer isn't shadowing Brown around the field. Then he's got to revert to just keeping Lattimore on one side like he did against the Detroit Lions (57 snaps at right corner, 2 on the left). And from there, it wouldn't exactly take an offensive genius to scheme up how you're going to get Brown matched up with Lattimore.

And of course, Quinn could focus on having safety help over the top for Lattimore, but there are two issues there: as a great YAC receiver who can thrive underneath, Brown is often doing damage in areas of the field where the safety help doesn't really matter. Plus, Quinn has generally seemed more worried about taking away Devonta Smith than AJ Brown.

In two matchups this season, Brown has 23 targets to Smith's 14. Last year in two games against Quinn's Cowboys defense, Brown had 22 targets to Smith's 13.

So while Brown has been a complete dud so far in the playoffs, this is his time to shine. The betting markets make it clear that there's no expectation of him continuing to completely flop like he did in the wild card and divisional rounds, but even that 60.5-yard line feels like it's underrating him.

Unless the Eagles get way up early and have the luxury of running the ball 30-plus times with Saquon Barkley, look for Brown to see double-digit targets again, largely at the expense of Lattimore, and to be the engine that drives this Eagles offense to a dominant win.

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