How much blame does Carson Wentz deserve for the Eagles' problems?

If there was one NFL team that was happy to be playing in front of empty stands on Sunday, it was the Eagles. While Fox made sure to pipe in some artificial Philly booing during their 37-19 loss to the Rams, the players on the field didn’t have to hear it, or whatever expletives the fans would have surely hurled at them on the sidelines.

The offensive performance has been particularly boo-worthy through the first two weeks of the 2020 season. The Eagles are dead last in just about every useful efficiency metric out there, including DVOA and EPA. As is usually the case in today’s NFL, Philadelphia’s crappy offensive results have been driven by crappy quarterback play. Carson Wentz has been bad.

Really bad.

Like the offense as a whole, Wentz also ranks dead last in basically every quarterback efficiency metric. In the past when the 27-year-old has struggled, it’s been easy to blame those struggles on what was (or wasn’t) going on around him.

For instance, his poor performance late in 2019 — Wentz ranked 32nd in PFF’s passing grades over the second half of the season — was excused because he was throwing to a bunch of created Madden players. Even after his three-turnover horror show in a Week 1 loss to Washington, a lot of the blame was steered toward the offensive line and Doug Pederson’s apparent lack of interest in adjusting his play calls to help mitigate the issues in pass protection.

Football is a complex sport with a bunch of moving parts, so, really, you could point a finger at anyone who has anything to do with the Eagles offense — from the front office down to the players. But this is the internet! Nobody is interested in an egalitarian approach to doling out blame, right? That’s not satisfying. We not only need to know who is most responsible for the mess, but we also must know exactly how much blame that person deserves.

What better way to do that than applying some analytics to the situation?

So that’s what I tried to do in order to put an exact number on how much each aspect of the Eagles offense has sucked. For this exercise, I’ll be using the Expected Points model created by ESPN’s Brian Burke. Here’s a good explanation of the stat. Because the Eagles have actually done a good job moving the ball on the ground, ranking sixth in rushing DVOA, we’ll only be focusing on the passing game for this.

I went through every passing play that resulted in a loss of Expected Points and decided the reason for the failure. Now, it’s impossible to blame a failed play on any one thing, so I chose the thing MOST responsible for the failure of the play. And, really, there were only a couple of plays where the blame really could have been shared. Here’s an example:

Is it a drop or a bad throw? I’d say both. Wentz puts it behind the receiver (which may have been intentional to protect him from the zone defender) but J.J. Arcega-Whiteside should make that catch. I ultimately blamed Arcega-Whiteside because I think most NFL receivers haul that one in.

Here’s a log of all the plays I reviewed if you want to judge these plays for yourself. By the end of my review process, there were nine categories of failures:

With all that out of the way, let’s take a look at the results…

The line was bad in Week 1 but was not a problem in the Week 2 loss. All of the failed plays I pinned on the protection came in the Washington game. The non-Wentz problem in the Week 2 game was the play-calling, though a lot of that was Rams defensive coordinator Brandon Staley calling a hell of a game.

So, yeah, it’s Wentz. According to my vaguely scientific method, he’s been responsible for 42.4 of the 70.4 Expected Points the Eagles have lost on negative plays.

More specifically, it’s been Wentz’s poor accuracy that has led to most of the problems, and, by my count, it has cost the Eagles about 25 points. And the analytics back this up: Wentz ranks 33rd in Next Gen Stats’ Completion Percentage Over Expectation. He ranks ahead of only Jeff Driskell and Mitch Trubisky in On-Target Throw Percentage, per Sports Info Solutions. And he’s 28th in PFF’s Adjusted Completion Percentage.

The film might be worse than the numbers. Here’s a cut-up of all the throws I marked as inaccurate, which may or may not be set to the Benny Hill music. I’d suggest not watching if you’re an Eagles fan.

There have certainly been instances of Wentz #TryingToDoTooMuch, but that’s always been a part of his game and his refusal to give up on a play can be an asset at times. We haven’t really seen any of those instances in 2020, but they will eventually come.

The numbers paint a depressing picture for Wentz, but I’d be more concerned if the bad plays were the result of poor decision making, which, in theory, would be harder to fix. But the accuracy problems are very clearly the product of broken mechanics. I’m not qualified to diagnose those problems, but I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to be dragging your back leg as if it were asleep when launching a ball downfield.

Here’s how that throw turned out by the way…

But here’s some good news, Eagles fans: A guy who is qualified to diagnose what’s ailing Wentz, professional quarterback coach Quincy Avery, says his problems are “very fixable”…

Wentz is never going to be a model of mechanical consistency, but he’s performed well in the accuracy metrics I cited a few paragraphs up, so there’s hope that he can, at least, get back to that level at some point this season. With the Eagles in an 0-2 hole, largely because of the quarterback, that point will have to come sooner rather than later if they’re going to make a run at the playoffs.