Ryan Mathews wasn’t going to go there.
No matter how many times he was asked.
After a bizarre night in which he was the only effective Eagle on offense but somehow got just six carries, the veteran running back refused to question his coaches publicly.
Leave that to everybody else.
What happened Sunday night was inexplicable.
Mathews ran six times for 97 yards and caught three passes for 24 more yards.
The Eagles ran 81 plays. Mathews ran six times.
“I don’t ever second guess what the coaches tell me,” Mathews said. “I’ve just got to wait for my turn and when it’s my turn to be called, I go.”
Here’s the math:
On the nine times Mathews touched the ball, the Eagles averaged 13.4 yards.
On the 72 plays Mathews didn’t touch the ball, the Eagles averaged 3.1 yards.
It makes no sense.
On Mathews’ fourth carry, with 6:55 left in the second quarter, Mathews ran 22 yards over left end.
He didn’t touch the ball on any of the Eagles’ next 17 plays, a span of over 12 minutes.
When he did touch the ball again, he ran 63 yards for a touchdown, the longest rushing touchdown of the Chip Kelly era.
The Eagles ran 31 plays the rest of the game — a span of 24:32. Just one of those 31 plays was a Mathews run.
“There’s only one ball and we’ve got three good players,” he said. “We’ve got to make the most out of each opportunity we got and I think that’s what we did.”
That’s what Mathews did.
He finished with 97 rushing yards on just six carries. That made him only the 17th running back in NFL history with that many yards on that many carries.
Starting with that 22-yard run, Mathews carried the football on just three of the Eagles’ final 59 plays spanning nearly 37 minutes.
He gained 86 yards on those three runs.
“I’ve just got to make the most of my carries,” he said. “We’ve got three running backs and we’re all trying to make plays, and we’ve just got to go with the coach’s call.”
Here are other things Mathews said: “I’m just here trying to help the team win.”
And: “They’re keeping us healthy and we’re rolling.”
And: “I’m just here to help the team win. It’s not frustrating. It’s frustrating when we lose.”
And: “I just try to do my best.”
Mathews, a one-time Pro Bowl back with the Chargers and two-time 1,000-yard rusher, now leads the NFL with 6.1 yards per carry.
But he has only the 38th-most carries in the league.
Mathews is averaging 2 ½ yards more per carry than 2015 NFL rushing leader DeMarco Murray and more than two yards per carry more than Darren Sproles.
Yet in the six games that both Murray and Mathews have played in, Murray has averaged 15 carries and Mathews has averaged just under 5 ½ carries.
Over the last three weeks, Mathews has 210 rushing yards on just 23 carries.
Including his 8-for-73 against Saints, Mathews is now only the 17th running back since 1960 — according to Pro Football Reference — with two games in a season with 73 or more rushing yards on eight or fewer carries.
Mathews is one of only three backs the last 56 years with two such games by Week 7. The others are Wayne Crow of the Bills in 1962 and Felix Jones of the Cowboys in 2009.
Over the past three weeks, Mathews has the ninth-most rushing yards in the NFL and the 33rd-most attempts.
As he has done all year, head coach Chip Kelly deflected questions about Mathews’ workload to running backs coach Duce Staley, a three-time 1,000-yard rusher during his Eagles career.
“Duce is running the rotation,” he said. “We talked about it. Some of it we were calling pass plays. He was in there for a few passes.”
But why didn’t he get the ball more?
“We had him in there,” he said. “He was playing in the third and fourth quarter. They were just pass plays called when he was in there.”