The Eagles opened their preseason with a 24-7 loss to the Ravens on Saturday night in Baltimore, and the story was the offense. It did not score on its first nine possessions, managed just two first downs and gained 45 yards before a late touchdown from the fourth unit kept the game from ending in a shutout.
That matters now because this was the first public look at an offense the Eagles have spent camp reworking around more under-center snaps, more play action, more motion, more middle-field throws and a different run-blocking scheme. Nick Sirianni rested most of his starters on both sides of the ball, so the burden fell on backups and players fighting to stick, but the results were still stark enough to raise the same question every preseason opener does: how much of the mess came from the new system, and how much came from the players asked to run it?
Sean Mannion was at the controls in the opener, but the first three drives never got off the ground. One began with two penalties, another ended after Andy Dalton came close to throwing an interception, and a third stalled when Darius Cooper could not haul in a third-down pass from Dalton. Those are the kinds of mistakes that bury drives before a playbook can reveal anything else, and they made the offense look disjointed even before the Ravens began to separate the score.
Tanner McKee did not try to soften it. He said that with so many new things, mistakes are going to happen, but that many of them are unacceptable. He also said the team will learn from them and be better for it. That is the cleanest read on the night: the Eagles are building something different, but Saturday showed that installation is not the same as execution.
The next test comes fast. Sirianni said the starters will get a lot of reps in New England for the joint practices on Wednesday and Thursday, a setting that should tell more about the offense than a preseason game played mostly by reserves. If the new structure is going to look like more than a work in progress, those sessions against the Patriots are where the first real proof should start to show.
Over the last five years, the Eagles have gone 5-0 in their regular season openers, which is part of why the preseason has carried less weight for them than for many teams. But this opener still showed the cost of leaning too hard on the idea that August does not matter. The Eagles wanted to protect starters and test a new scheme at the same time, and the first answer they got was an offense that looked anything but clean.
