NFL Mailbag: The Eagles’ Fate, Purdy vs. Darnold, Tackling a New Ravens Offense

Can Jalen Hurts and Nick Sirianni buck Super Bowl history? Could Sam Darnold turn out to be better than Brock Purdy? Will Justin Herbert finally air it out for the Los Angeles Chargers? If Josh McDaniels cooked you dinner, what would it taste like? 

The answers to all of these questions and more can be found in The Messenger’s Week 1 NFL mailbag!

Got a question for a future mailbag? Go bother Mike on Threads or Twitter/X.

Coaches who win a Super Bowl for a team after having lost their first Super Bowl for that team are rare. We had Sean McVay do it with a different quarterback and a four-year gap between trips. Prior to that it was Bill Cowher, who waited 10 years for his second trip. Which leads me to this question: Is the Nick Sirianni/Jalen Hurts combo able to overcome this history?
– PhillyAx @PhillyAx, X/Twitter

A lot of Super Bowl history boils down to two facts:

History is therefore full of coaches and quarterbacks who win the Super Bowl and never return, or who return many years later under different circumstances. All that says about those coaches and quarterbacks is that they were not Bill Belichick and Tom Brady or Bill Walsh and Joe Montana.

The biggest problems facing Jalen Hurts and Nick Sirianni in the years to come are coaching-staff brain drain, Jason Kelce and Lane Johnson aging out/retiring, the ravages of the salary cap and all the other mundane things that drag contenders back toward the field. There’s no sense that they got “exposed” in the Super Bowl (as, perhaps Jared Goff did), or that the team is flying apart from the inside (as the Donovan McNabb-Terrell Owens Eagles did).

If the Eagles fail to return to the Super Bowl, it will be for prosaic reasons, not because losing last year put them on some collision course with history.

How much of Justin Herbert's infamously low air yards last year was coaching/play calling, and how much was his own tendencies?
– @jonriegel on Threads

(WARNING: The following response contains mild skepticism about Justin Herbert and may not be suitable for readers of other NFL outlets, where Herbert is treated like a cross between Peyton Manning and Cyrus the Great).

Herbert’s average depth of throw in 2022, per Sports Info Solutions, was 6.5 yards. That’s the seventh-lowest figure for a year-long starting quarterback (400-plus pass attempts) since 2015.

Joe Lombardi, the Chargers’ offensive coordinator in 2022, coached in Sean Payton’s Saints system for many years, and Drew Brees was known for his short passing. Brees’ lowest air yard rate of 6.1 came in 2020, when he was hurt for much of the year and ready to retire. His second-lowest figure of 6.6 came in 2019. Before that, Brees’ air yards hovered above 7.0, low but closer to the NFL average. 

Herbert averaged 7.3 air yards per throw as a rookie in 2020, when Shane Steichen was his coordinator, and a robust 7.6 air yards per throw in Lombardi’s first year, in 2021. Lombardi isn’t exactly Bruce Arians when it comes to risk management, but last year’s rate of short throws was extreme even for him, while Herbert has yet to let ’er rip in the 8.0 air-yard-per-throw range (where everyone from Kirk Cousins to Aaron Rodgers generally live) with any NFL coach.

Here’s the thing: The Chargers started rookies at left tackle and right guard for much of last season and were down to their backup center for a while. It’s fashionable to rip Lombardi, but he had a reason to emphasize quick throws and short passes. 

Herbert will probably throw downfield more often now that his offensive line has stabilized. If he does not, Brandon Staley and new coordinator Kellen Moore will receive all of the (very loud) blame. 

If Brock Purdy gets hurt or turns into a pumpkin, how effective do you think Sam Darnold can be operating within Shanahan's system?
– Scott Lemieux @LemieuxLGM on X/Twitter.

Darnold would be fine. There’s a high probability that Darnold is a better quarterback than Purdy. But we are evaluating Darnold based on five years in lost franchises with goofball coaches while we are evaluating Purdy based on seven games where the defense kept giving him the ball in opponent’s territory and the Deebo Squadron turned every screen pass into a Super Tecmo Bowl highlight. 

At this point, are top running backs and linebackers undervalued? Miles Sanders was top-5 in DVOA and has an annual salary of $6 million.
– michaelkurtz2 on Threads

Yes. Particularly running backs.

In 2023 free agency, some team could have signed Miles Sanders, Jamaal Williams and Devin Singletary for a combined cost of $13.5-million in signing bonuses and first-year money. That team could run the wishbone! More usefully, it could have the ultimate three-headed backfield of young-ish veterans for the price of a mid-tier tight end, with minimal future obligations. That’s silly.

Everyone, including coaches and general managers, now understands that running back production is largely interchangeable and that the backs themselves wear down quickly. But no one is performing the same calculations at other positions. Cornerback performance is very volatile, yet Trevon Diggs gets a reported $97-million extension for his spicy blend of interceptions and toastings. Does paying Cole Kmet’s $32-million guaranteed really make sense when every draft class has someone like Jelani Woods or Isaiah Likely hanging around in the middle rounds? Teams are currently taking high risks at other positions, then balancing their budgets on the running backs’ backs. 

Backs like Sanders and Singletary at least merit short contracts in the $7-10 million per year range, as do Saquon Barkley and Josh Jacobs. It will take one of these young backs hitting free agency after a 1,500 yard season to course-correct the current trend a bit. 

Am I wrong to still be high on Kyler Murray as the Cardinals’ franchise quarterback going forward? I feel like the general narrative is that the Cards are going to be awful this year so they can draft Caleb Williams and I'm like... ‘Why?’
– GeoRayzr

General Narrative is a brilliant military tactician. He crafts his strategy out of available materiel: Kyler Murray and Caleb Williams are clickable names, “tanking” is a fun/buzzy internet topic, pumping up college quarterbacks and castigating disappointing/polarizing veterans are America’s real national pastimes, and the Cardinals called attention to their awfulness with their late-August trades. Put them all together and you get a combustible fire-and-forget talking point: The Cardinals are through with Kyler tanking for Caleb.

The new Cardinals braintrust is unlikely to evaluate Murray based on reputation or Call of Duty memes; that was more of an old Cardinals braintrust sort of thing. Jonathan Gannon and Monti Ossenfort will want to see Murray running the team in practice, and (ideally) in live games, before they make some sort of blockbuster decision.

Until that happens, it’s no use trying to be sensible, Anakin: General Narrative holds the high ground.

What's more likely: three AFC East playoff teams or just the division winner?
– James London on Discord

One division winner. Per Aaron Schatz’s FTN Almanac, the Patriots, Dolphins, Bills and Jets have the four hardest schedules in the NFL, in that order. AFC North schedules are much easier (despite the quality of the division itself), and that will open the door for more Wild-Card opportunities there. 

What team will give up the first safety of the season?
– Danny Hatcher @rulingwalnut, X/Twitter

The Dolphins will surrender a safety against the New England Patriots on Sunday night in Week 2 when a shotgun snap whizzes past Tua Tagovailoa’s head due to Foxborough crowd noise and he is forced to swat the ball through the back of the end zone before a defender pounces on it. 

Hey Mike, can you explain to me why Josh McDaniels got a third chance?
– John Harbaugh Slander = Prison, Discord

Josh McDaniels got a third chance because Mark Davis is a failson with no concept of how to run a professional NFL franchise. He bought McDaniels’ “Patriots Way” horsefiddle like he was a 1920s rube buying the Brooklyn Bridge.

This particular question was tied to Chandler Jones’ recent social media outburst against the Raiders and McDaniels. One of the signature Belichick Buddy “improve-the-culture” moves is to treat important players badly (see: Matt Patricia and Darius Slay, Bill O’Brien and pretty much everyone) for some inscrutable reason which probably boils down to the coach just being an insecure tin-pot dictator. 

Just how different can we expect the Ravens offense to be?
– Hellomynameis on Discord

Let’s answer this question by crunching some numbers. 

Last season, the Ravens ran the ball 339 times from shotgun with two running backs on the field, per Sports Info Solutions. The Falcons were second in this category, with just 117 rushes with two backs and the quarterback in shotgun. Only four teams have used this particular personnel grouping and formation more than 200 times in a season since 2015: the 2022 Ravens, the 2021 Ravens (285 times), the 2020 Ravens (265 times) and the 2019 Ravens (209 times).

So the Ravens offense was different from every other NFL offense in some easy-to-spot ways. That uniqueness was a double-edged sword. The Ravens attempted just 108 passes from three-wide receiver formations, the lowest figure in the NFL (the Falcons were second with 175 such passes) and averaged just 5.9 yards per pass attempt on those passes, tied with the Texans for the lowest rate in the NFL. You could argue that the Ravens rarely had three healthy wide receivers, but they were also short on healthy running backs for most of the year. 

Todd Monken will pull the Ravens back toward conventionality, which will probably amount to a net positive for the team and Lamar Jackson. Greg Roman’s scheme looked revolutionary when he first unveiled it with Jackson behind the wheel. By last year, it looked like a system that Mountain West Conference programs abandoned in the early 2000s. 

I’ve been watching The Bear recently. Which NFL head coach would make the best line cook? Which would make the worst?
– @nthnwingo on Threads.

He’s a coordinator now, but Vic Fangio would make the best line cook. I could picture him flipping pizza dough on the boardwalk during his summer downtime. (I am an Italian from New Jersey so I can make that joke). Also, his meatball recipe is now canonical. 

Andy Reid would not make a good line cook. His mac ‘n’ cheese recipe is too labor-intensive. Spongebob could make 100 crabby patties in the time it takes Reid to grate the gruyere. 

As for the worst, Sean Payton is pretty much Gordon Ramsey 2.0, but I am guessing anything Josh McDaniels cooks tastes like it comes from a hospital kitchen.

The Wild Card would be Mike McDaniel, who might get a sudden urge to smother everything in crumbled up Cheetos and/or salted caramel, then get the munchies and devour the entire kitchen himself. 

Which game (or games) are you most looking forward to watching this weekend?
– The_Witch on Discord

Looking forward to games is different when you have to cover all of Sunday’s action for a Monday column: I have to think of the games in terms of simultaneous “batches” and outline the most logical viewing plan from a storyline standpoint. 

That said, I love how Week 1 shakes out. 49ers-Steelers and Browns-Bengals stick out among the early games, with all the rookie quarterbacks playing early enough that I can get a longer look at them on Sunday night on NFL-Plus. Then I plan to have one eye on Packers-Bears while the rest of my neighborhood has both eyes on Eagles-Patriots. Cowboys-Giants is interesting, but not “don’t you dare write your lede until the game is over” interesting; I can catch up on C.J. Stroud or Bryce Young during commercial breaks. 

Best of all, the Jets don’t play until Monday night, so I can ignore Aaron Rodgers’ existence for a few precious hours on Sunday.