Sean Mannion got his first look at calling plays for the Philadelphia Eagles on Saturday night in Baltimore. It did not go well.
The Eagles lost their preseason opener 24-7 to the Ravens, and the final score somehow flattered them. Philadelphia’s offense, a unit now running Mannion’s version of the Kyle Shanahan/Sean McVay system after years of Kellen Moore’s scheme, managed just 159 total yards. It went 0-for-9 on third down. It had two first downs heading into the fourth quarter. The only points came on a garbage-time touchdown drive engineered by fourth-string rookie quarterback Cole Payton, whose scrambling kept the Eagles from being shut out entirely.
To be fair to Mannion, this was about as close to a non-representative sample as a football game can be. Jalen Hurts didn’t play. Neither did most of the starting offensive line, the receiving corps, or really anyone who will matter once the games count. Andy Dalton and Tanner McKee split the early snaps and combined to go 9-of-16 for 55 yards without a touchdown or an interception. They were competent, uneventful and forgettable. Mannion, by design, kept the scheme vanilla. A game nobody was trying to win but try and survive it without an injury. That was the only positive for the night, outside of Markell Bell, Jeremiah Trotter Jr, and Cole Payton. Darius Cooper had a crash landing after the glow up we wrote last week.
But “it doesn’t count” only stretches so far. However you contextualize it, an NFL offense, even a backup-laden one, even in Week 1 of the preseason, is not supposed to look like this. Outgained 440 to 159. Thirty-one first downs allowed to six. Ten penalties for 96 yards. It was, by any reasonable measure, an embarrassing night for a team that’s spent the better part of a decade near the top of the NFC.
So the natural question: how bad was this, really, in the context of Eagles history?
The Offense Was Already a Problem
None of this happened in a vacuum. Mannion didn’t take over a unit that was humming along fine before he got here, he took over one that, by the numbers, had already become one of the worst for the franchise in this century.
According to Pro Football Reference’s Simple Rating System, the 2025 Eagles offense posted an OSRS (Offensive SRS) of -1.8. That’s the third-worst mark for a Philadelphia offense in the entire 21st century, trailing only the 2012 team (-5.3, a 4-12 disaster that got Andy Reid fired) and the 2020 team (-2.8, the 4-11-1 collapse that ended the Doug Pederson era). That 2020 offense, worth noting, wasn’t a one-quarterback failure, Carson Wentz started most of the season before Jalen Hurts took over as the starter for the final four games, with Hurts also seeing spot duty and package snaps in a few other games along the way. It was a lost year across two quarterbacks, not just one. What separates 2025 from either of those seasons, of course, is that the Eagles still went 11-6 and made the playoffs, which says less about the offense working, and more about how much the defense and the running game were covering for it.
That’s the backdrop for the coaching change. Mannion wasn’t brought in to tinker with something that was already good. He was brought in because the passing game had quietly become one of the least effective units the franchise has fielded in 25 years, even while the team kept winning anyway. A rough preseason opener doesn’t confirm anything about whether the fix is working, but it’s also not the encouraging start anyone in Philadelphia was hoping for.
The Last Time It Was This Bad
You have to go back nearly two decades to find a preseason opener as offensively barren as this one.
On August 13, 2007, the Eagles opened their preseason in Baltimore and lost 29-3. The Eagles’ starters likely weren’t the ones on the field for most of that one, preseason openers rarely feature them — but whoever was out there for Philadelphia’s offense could only turn one drive into points: a second-quarter field goal. That was it. Three points, and nothing else to show for it.
On paper, that’s worse than what happened in 2026, the Eagles at least got to seven points this time around. But look closer at how each team got there, and the 2026 version starts to look just as ugly, maybe uglier. In 2007, the offense at least found the end zone… well, it didn’t, it got three points on the board in the second quarter, with a half of football still left to play. In 2026, Philadelphia’s only points came on a touchdown drive in the final four minutes of the fourth quarter, against a Ravens defense that was, by that point, stocked with players fighting for a practice-squad spot rather than a 53-man roster. Scoring late, against players who won’t be anywhere near an NFL sideline once the regular season starts, isn’t much of an accomplishment. At least the 2007 offense got its field goal with the game still competitive, against competition that mattered more than fringe roster hopefuls trying to make a highlight reel.
By that measure, there’s a real argument that 2026 was the worse offensive showing of the two, even with more than double the points on the scoreboard.
What 2007 Turned Into
Context matters here, and the 2007 season is a useful reminder that a bad exhibition game means almost nothing about what follows, but it’s also worth focusing on what that team’s offense actually did over the course of the year, since that’s the real point of comparison.
That Eagles team finished 8-8, good for fourth place in the NFC East, and the offense was clearly the weaker half of the roster. The defense was outstanding, Pro Football Reference credits that unit with the second-highest DSRS (Defensive Simple Rating System) mark in the entire league in 2007, at 5.1. That’s about as clear a signal as there is that the Eagles were winning games on the back of their defense, not their offense, that season. And it still wasn’t enough. The Cowboys ran away with the division at 13-3 behind one of the best offenses in the conference, the Giants snuck into the playoffs as a wild card at 10-6 and went on to shock the previously undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, and Washington finished 9-7. Philadelphia, propped up by an elite defense and let down by its offense, was left on the outside looking in.
The lesson isn’t subtle: a putrid preseason opener told you nothing about the Eagles’ offensive floor in 2007, and it likely tells you nothing about the ceiling, or floor, of Mannion’s offense in 2026. What it can tell you is where the early-season work needs to happen. The Eagles have two more preseason games and a less than a month of practice to get this offense functional before it matters. Whether it looks anything like the operation that struggled to escape its own territory in Baltimore is the real story to watch.
The Stakes
Mannion is now the fourth different offensive playcaller the Eagles have had since 2022. Shane Steichen, Brian Johnson, Kellen Moore, and now Mannion, a level of turnover that’s become its own storyline in Philadelphia. He inherits a Jalen Hurts–led offense that, despite the team’s continued winning, posted the third-worst OSRS of the 21st century in 2025. The organization is explicitly betting that scheme and quarterback development, the exact things Mannion is supposed to bring from his time in Green Bay, were the missing pieces, more than raw playcalling experience.
The Honeymoon Never Lasts Long in Philadelphia
If there’s one thing Philadelphia sports fans have proven over and over, it’s that goodwill has an extremely short shelf life. Say the wrong thing, call the wrong play, or short-arm the wrong pass, and the city can turn on you before you’ve even unpacked.
Ricky Watters found that out in his very first game as an Eagle. Signed away from the Super Bowl-champion 49ers in the spring of 1995, Watters arrived in Philadelphia with a ring, a Pro Bowl résumé, and about as much goodwill as a free-agent addition can carry. It lasted exactly one game. In the Eagles’ 1995 season opener, a 21-6 home loss to Tampa Bay, Watters avoided taking a hit over the middle rather than fully extending for a Randall Cunningham pass. Asked afterward why he pulled up short, Watters offered four words that have outlived his entire career in Philadelphia: “For who? For what?” It became an instant local legend. Shorthand, forever after, for a player perceived as not caring enough about the city or the team. Never mind that Watters went on to rush for nearly 3,800 yards and 31 touchdowns over three excellent seasons in Philadelphia, made two Pro Bowls, and later admitted the brutal reception from Eagles fans pushed him to play harder. The quote stuck. It still gets replayed on sports radio three decades later.
Thirty years after Watters learned that lesson, Kevin Patullo learned a much uglier version of it. Promoted to offensive coordinator in 2025 after Kellen Moore left for New Orleans, Patullo spent the season absorbing blame as the Eagles’ offense slid toward the bottom third of the league in yards and points despite a roster stacked with Jalen Hurts, Saquon Barkley, A.J. Brown, and DeVonta Smith. By late November, “Fire Kevin” chants were echoing through Lincoln Financial Field, and a website calling for his job had already gone up. Then came Black Friday: a 24-15 home loss to the Bears, Philadelphia’s second straight defeat, its offense managing just 87 rushing yards on 17 carries. Hours later, at roughly 2:50 a.m., someone drove to Patullo’s home in Moorestown, New Jersey, and pelted it with eggs. Video of the incident spread online, initially mistaken for rocks being thrown, before police confirmed what actually happened. Patullo, to his credit, didn’t dodge the subject the following week. “When it involves your family, obviously it crosses the line,” he said. “We just have to move on.” Nick Sirianni stuck with him as playcaller anyway.
Two very different eras, two very different levels of misbehavior, a bruising quote versus an actual crime, but the same underlying current runs through both. Philadelphia doesn’t do slow-building disappointment. It goes from hopeful to hostile almost instantly, and it doesn’t much care whether the target is a Super Bowl-winning running back on Day One or a five-year staff assistant 10 games into a promotion. Which is worth keeping in mind as Sean Mannion, 33 years old and calling plays for the first time in his life, tries to fix an offense that just delivered one of its worst performances in 20 years.
Shhhh!
If you are quiet and listen carefully, you can hear the sound of Eagles fans knives sharpening, muffling out the whispers of those Sean Mannion doubts in their ears.
If the offense doesn’t improve, you will need noise cancellation headphones to ignore it.
