Eagles’ Jason Kelce gives temperature of team after 2-0 start

The Eagles are 2-0 and that’s great. Right?

You’ve probably heard a ton of NFL coaches and players say that it’s hard to win in this league and they’re correct — so 2-0 is 2-0. But the Eagles are also coming off an incredible 2022 season that got them to the Super Bowl and they haven’t quite lived up to that standard so far.

So, sure, the Eagles are undefeated after two weeks. But there’s a ton to improve.

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When captain and longtime center Jason Kelce joined the 94WIP Morning Show with Joe DeCamera and Jon Ritchie on Wednesday, he was asked to give the temperature of the team after two weeks.

As always, Kelce gave an extremely thoughtful response:

“Alright, I’ll try to give this as accurate as I can. We’re 2-0, which is good,” Kelce said. “But we’re 2-0 and we know we could very easily be 1-1 and we have not played football the way we wanted to play football yet. So the temperature of the team is a little bit on edge. And I think everybody feels that we need to play better and if we want to live up to the expectations that we think that we are capable of playing like, we need to make improvements and we need to perform better. I think that’s the temperature that I feel and, honestly, I think that’s a good temperature. That’s where you want to be in this league.

“I’ve been on record before saying you don’t want to be comfortable. When you’re comfortable, there’s a shoe waiting to drop in this league. I think that we all understand that we have great talent on this roster, we have great coaches, we have a great organization. We’re sitting here 2-0 but I think everybody is very cognizant of the fact that we need to continue to improve and work.”

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The Eagles found a way to beat the Patriots 25-20 in Week 1and then beat the Vikings 34-28 in Week 1. In the Patriots game the Eagles were up by as many as 16 points and in the Vikings game they were up by as many as 20, but both games got a little closer than the Eagles would have liked.

After two weeks, the Eagles have the No. 11-ranked offense in the NFL and the No. 26-ranked defense in yards. But the defense has six takeaways in two games and the offense has been a bigger issue than those numbers might suggest.

Against the Vikings, the Eagles put up 430 yards of offense but 259 of them came on the ground. The Eagles have the No. 29-ranked passing offense in the NFL through two games and MVP candidate Jalen Hurts hasn’t looked like himself.

You have to give the Patriots’ defense and the Vikings’ defense some credit. They had good game plans to slow down the Eagles’ high-powered passing offense and a lot of what they did went unscouted.

“It’s happened a lot the first two games,” Kelce said. “And we saw it a lot last year. And we’re going to continue to see it. I think teams are going to continue to try to throw us off and do things that are a little unorthodox or things that they haven’t done before because we’re one of the most explosive offenses in the league last year.”

Kelce basically thinks the Eagles have earned their reputation and are going to get their opponent’s best shot each and every week. He compared it to the Lions’ strategy against the Chiefs in Week 1, when Dan Campbell elected to run a fake punt from deep in their own territory in the first quarter to keep the first touchdown drive alive. The Lions were able to upset the Chiefs, 21-20.

Teams know when they face the Chiefs, doing everything in a conventional manner won’t be enough to win. The Eagles might be on the receiving end of that these days, especially when they’re on offense.

But Kelce thinks all these unorthodox defenses will help the Eagles in the long run.

“I think the more we see all of these looks,” Kelce said, “and these things people have looked at from either colleges or across the league and have looked to implement them to throw us off early, quite frankly, I think the better.”