Inside Eagles’ push for player-led scouting reports ahead of matchup with Seahawks

At the end of their regularly scheduled Tuesday meeting, as coaches and players dispersed in the NovaCare Complex, Philadelphia Eagles safety Kevin Byard approached Sean Desai privately and pitched the defensive coordinator a new plan.

“Hey, let us do the scouting report this week,” Byard said.

By “us,” Byard meant the defensive backs. By “the scouting report,” he meant the position-by-position breakdown of the Seattle Seahawks, their upcoming opponent.

It’s a task the Eagles coaching staff typically handles. From Nick Sirianni to Desai to even the most unknown assistant, the staff spends the early portions of their in-season weeks building comprehensive game plans, which they begin implementing on the first days of practice.

The scouting report is only a percentage of what rookie linebacker Nolan Smith described as “days worth of work.” Some days are devoted to one or two phases. A round of meetings on first- and second-down situations, followed by a practice. A round of meetings on third-down situations, followed by a practice. A round of red zone meetings, followed by a practice. And, in every meeting, coaches are handing players “dissertations on everything,” Smith says.

Notes. Tendencies. Expectations.

“We do a really good job of detailing everything,” Smith said. “To the outside world, it may not look like that.”

That last observation prompted Byard’s proposal. The Eagles have been blatantly disastrous on defense, and Desai, the team’s first-year coordinator, has received the brunt of the blame. Still, even after the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys scored on 10 straight possessions (omitting a game-ending kneel) and Philadelphia’s 30th-ranked third-down defense depreciated to the NFL’s worst, Sirianni said he was not changing anyone’s play-calling duties — and he remained confident that his staff will find solutions.

“I feel good with the people that we have in this building,” Sirianni said. “We’re 10-3. We’re in control of our own destiny, and we’re going to keep rolling and finding answers with the people that we have.”

Sirianni did make a minor change this week. Since the Eagles are now playing the Seahawks in the NFL’s first-ever “Monday Night Football” flex game, they were afforded an extra day in their schedule. So Sirianni chose to have a full practice on Thursday, a day that normally would’ve been a walk-through, because he felt the Eagles needed to “work on our fundamentals.” Bad tackling exacerbated the home blowout to the 49ers, and the Eagles lost three fumbles against the Cowboys.

But Byard and a few veteran defensive backs believed the players, at least those in the secondary, also needed to assume more accountability. There had been too many breakdowns in coverage, and too many players beaten in critical scenarios. In the last three games against the Buffalo Bills, 49ers and Cowboys, Josh Allen, Brock Purdy and Dak Prescott combined for a perfect passer rating (158.3) in third-and-medium situations (4-7 yards) while completing 12 of 13 passes for 212 yards and three touchdowns.

Desai and his staff haven’t lacked creativity. They configured the secondary in three separate ways. They set cornerback Darius Slay on the opponent’s No. 1 receiver. They used Bradley Roby at slot corner on short third downs and Eli Ricks on longer situations. They debuted rookie Kelee Ringo at outside corner in dime packages.

Yet the leaks persisted. While Desai told reporters Tuesday that vetting for improvements “always starts with the play call,” it’s important to note how he added, “for me at least.” By persuading Desai to let the defensive backs handle the scouting report, Byard ensured that a young secondary that includes three rookies was also doing its part to find solutions.

“There’s ownership in all this,” Byard told The Athletic. “We all take ownership. When the coaches do their interviews (with the media), that’s one of the first things they say, ‘Hey, I’ve got to do better.’ It’s the same thing for us (as players). We all have our hands in the same pot. At the end of the day, we can all do more. We’re in the solution business. Not the complaining business. We don’t do no complaining here. We all stick together. We’re going to fix it together. We’re going to play better.”

Desai agreed with the arrangement. Byard relayed the message to the rest of the defensive backs, and they split up their scouting assignments.

“Everybody kind of picked a player,” Byard said.

Byard took quarterback Geno Smith. Safety Reed Blankenship took Seattle’s tight ends. Other defensive backs The Athletic spoke with this week — veteran cornerback James Bradberry, rookie corners Ricks and Ringo, and rookie safety Sydney Brown — took specific wide receivers and running backs. Slay was absent from practices and locker room sessions while listed with a knee injury.

They spent Wednesday (a scheduled off day for players this week) diving into their film studies. Byard observed Geno Smith’s tendencies. (“I’m not obviously going to give you everything,” he said.) Bradberry watched his receiver’s past three games and took detailed notes. Was the receiver lined up inside? Outside? Where were his targets coming from? What moves revealed the wideout’s technical strengths and weaknesses? Blankenship said he hunkered down at home, cranked on some music and typed up pages of notes on his iPad. Ricks completed a breakdown that included a player’s 40-yard dash time, size and weight, plus the routes they liked to run and those they didn’t.

The defensive backs arrived Thursday and presented their findings during their position group meeting, a secondary-only assembly that included defensive backs coach D.K. McDonald, assistant defensive backs coach Taver Johnson and nickels coach Ronell Williams. The coaches, Byard said, “obviously gave their own scouting report” during the team meeting, but they “gave us the floor as well” once they broke down into their separate position group sessions.

“Guys had some really good stuff,” Byard said. “You could tell guys really watched a bunch of film, really studied these guys. I would just say hopefully it just helps us to be able to play faster. But I also understand how these guys want to play. That’s what this league is about. It’s a player’s league, and you’ve got to know the people you’re going up against.”

“Just hearing from other guys, young guys like Sydney and Kelee, it was cool to see what they got from watching film based on the players they saw,” Bradberry added. “They had the breakdown. … It was cool to hear them talk, because they don’t talk a whole lot.”

Ringo, who logged a career-high 22 defensive snaps against the Cowboys, said he’s absorbed the depth veterans dig for in their approaches.

“Little things like downs and distances, what types of guys you’re going against, splits, things like that,” said Ringo, a fourth-round pick. “Certain routes that can be run at certain points throughout routes. The more repetition that you get of that, just like guarding somebody, it definitely can make just covering them a lot more easier.”

These are habits Byard and Bradberry had already formed. Byard, whom the Eagles acquired from the Tennessee Titans in an Oct. 23 trade, has developed a process over eight seasons that’s yielded him two first-team All-Pro selections. Bradberry, a 2016 second-round pick of the Panthers, acknowledged that he “didn’t really watch film my first two years.” But he eventually observed seven-time All-Pro linebacker Luke Kuechly’s routine while in Carolina, dove into the work and began to understand the bigger picture when he was on the field.

When Bradberry signed with the New York Giants after his rookie contract expired, the cornerback said then-head coach Joe Judge required players to do scouting reports of their own. They’d get assigned a specific player, do research, build a report, then give a presentation at the facility during team meetings. Bradberry earned a Pro Bowl selection in 2020 and, in 2021, his four interceptions with the Giants were tied for 12th in the NFL.

Judge made mandatory what Bradberry believes players should already be doing themselves.

“Of course, you get so much information here that you feel like once you get your information here, you’ve got everything that you need,” Bradberry said. “But you really just apply that information that you get, and you apply it as you’re watching film. ‘Oh, that’s a tendency.’ Or, ‘Oh, this is how he’s going to do it.’ You’ve got to visualize it.”

Those are the tidbits that add necessary perspectives in game plan meetings, Byard says. Bradberry, Blankenship, Ricks and Brown all stated their firm belief that the NFL is a “player’s league,” and they relish the “back-and-forth” relationship players build with their coaches. Brown says he’s learning how players can supply the key information that makes the scheme find its best fit. But they have to be searching for that information, and they must speak up when they find it.

“It really breeds confidence in everybody, right?” said Brown, a third-round pick who’s started in three games and played 25.8 percent of the defense’s total snaps. “Because if someone doesn’t do their job, I mean, everybody in the room’s going to know. I think that’s harder in the film room than on the field. On the field, you just move on to the next play. When you’re in the film room, s—, you’re on the spot until you figure it out.”

Such meetings are therefore sometimes at risk of sparking intensity, especially during losing streaks. The Eagles’ defensive backs agreed, Brown said, that “we’ve got to approach it a different way.”

“I felt like it brought us closer together, just to be able to hear everybody’s voice,” said Blankenship, who’s in his first year as a full-time starter after signing with the Eagles as an undrafted free agent in 2022. “I feel like it was good for the younger guys, too, that maybe didn’t watch as much film. Hold everyone accountable. That’s the biggest part. That’s the leadership role. In times of adversity, you want to hear everybody’s voice to make sure they’re confident in what they see and what they do.”

There’s a sense of optimism among the defensive backs that they’re more prepared for the Seahawks, who enter the weekend with the NFL’s 15th-ranked passing offense (232.9 yards per game). Several said they would continue doing player-assigned scouting reports for the rest of the season.

“We’re just trying to find more ways to prepare better, prepare harder — especially as we go on the stretch we’re on,” Byard said. “This is very important. So, that’s the only thing I’m really concerned about is just our preparation, our process, how we go about things. So, it’s just trying to do more. Obviously, I’ve been here for a little while. I’m just trying to do more, as much as we can as players, to make sure we are prepared out there. Hopefully, that will obviously manifest in games.”

(Top photo of Reed Blankenship and Kevin Byard: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)