The Philadelphia Eagles got their best win of the season on Sunday night as they defeated the Cowboys 26-17 at Lincoln Financial Field.
Philadelphia jumped out to an early 20-0 lead in the second quarter, but the Cowboys were able to cut it to 20-17 in the fourth. However, Philly went on a 13-play, 75-yard drive to put it away as Jalen Hurts connected with DeVonta Smith on a seven-yard touchdown pass.
The Eagles scored 20 points in the second quarter on Sunday, and this season, Philadelphia has outscored its opponents 112-27 in that quarter.
However, things have not been the same in the second half. The Eagles have been outscored 51-35 and were outscored 14-6 by the Cowboys in the second half. While they are 6-0, Philly has to do a better job in the second half.
On Monday, Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni discussed his team’s play in the second half of games.
“It’s just finishing the game,” he said. “Again, it’s not — here is what makes it hard to play a complete game. A team that’s really good on the other side, right? That’s a good football team, as we know. So, yeah, of course, we were up 20-3 at the half and would’ve loved to just duplicate that and won the game 40 to 6, but in the grand scheme of things, that’s hard to do.
“The second half is played a little bit differently, so you want to — you just want to finish the game. I think there is no doubt, right, that if we have good first halves and that the second halves, whether the defense has held them and the offense hasn’t scored, or whatever it is, we haven’t played a complete game in the sense of we haven’t really blown open a game when we have had two-score leads.
“From what I understand, I believe we’ve had two-score leads in every game this season, and so you want to just be able to end a game and put a game away. I think that’s what we’re talking about, is to just really finish the game and put it away. Things change the way you view things in the second half sometimes when you do have these leads, but you always want to be aggressive and always want to put points on the board, and we haven’t done that.
“We’ll look at that as coaches and see what we’re doing as coaches, how we can put our guys in better positions to do that.”
At this point, they have overcome their poor play in the second half, and with the team on their bye week, Sirianni and the coaching staff will have the opportunity to fix the second-half woes for the Eagles when they return against the Steelers.
