After four games and with his production way down from a year ago, a lot of people, fantasy football players in particular, are wondering just what in the hell is wrong with Eagles running back LeSean McCoy. There isn't an easy answer to that question. There are several factors at work here.
LeSean McCoy will be just fine ... maybe
The Eagles running back has a scant 192 rushing yards through four games this season, averaging just 2.74 yards per carry. Retired NFL defensive end Stephen White diagnoses the problem and projects whether we’ll see the real Shady this season.
Rich Schultz
First and foremost, McCoy isn't running behind the same offensive line this year as he did last year. Right tackle Lane Johnson, a guy who played well and continued to get better throughout his rookie season last year, missed the first four games because of a PED suspension. All-Pro left guard Evan Mathis has been out since Week 1, and is on injured reserve with a designation to return after eight games. Not having those two guys has been a big deal. I was a backup for most of my seven-year career, and speaking honestly, backups are usually backups for a reason. The holes just haven't been there like they were last year and the blocking up front hasn't been nearly as dominant.
There is also the fact that with DeSean Jackson gone, defenses simply haven't shown the same fear to play with a single-high safety that they did last year. The one team that did a good job slowing down the Eagles early last season was the Chiefs (which I wrote about last year). They played a lot of single-high safety with man-to-man against the Eagles, leaving at least six and sometimes seven men in the box to play the run. However, the Chiefs were one of the few teams that could pull that off in practice because most teams didn't have the kind of corners who could match up man-to-man in the passing game. Most teams didn't have any corner who could go man-to-man with Jackson for most of the game. That fear of DJax taking the top off the defense led opponents to keeping two safeties deep, which opened up the running game for the Eagles and McCoy.
Now? Every team they’ve faced so far has played quite a bit of single-high safety. It’s a numbers game. When the Eagles have the numbers, Shady has room to get busy. When they don’t, he’ll have to beat at least one unblocked defender. McCoy is good, but beating an unblocked defender consistently is just damn near impossible.
Finally, there is McCoy himself. He just hasn't looked the same in the last few weeks. In the first two games of the season, he gained 74 and 79 rushing yards against the Jaguars and Colts, respectively. Not crazy numbers, but 76 yards per game over 16 games is still more than 1,200 yards on the ground. McCoy has only gained 22 and 17 yards in his last two outings, against Washington and the 49ers, respectively. That's a big damned difference.
Just as interesting is the fact that after he caught 10 passes total through his first two games, Shady hasn’t caught a single pass since. So what gives?
Photo via Getty Images
Go back to the Washington game in Week 3, when he came out with a head injury near the end of the first quarter. McCoy got smacked pretty good, then just lay on the field in pain for a while at the end of a 9-yard run. All of a sudden, he was back in the game on the Eagles’ very next offensive series. I am sure I’m not the only one who thought that was a pretty damn quick turnaround for him to get cleared from a head injury.
I am not saying he had a concussion; for all I know the Eagles’ training staff just works at the speed of sound. What I can say is from that point on his running has been a little ... different. Again, there hasn’t been a lot of daylight anyway. With defenses loading the box and suspect blocking against two pretty good front sevens, you just won’t see many big lanes to run through. I have noticed that McCoy has been attempting to bounce the ball outside more in the last two weeks than what I saw in the first two.
Shady has always been a very creative runner. It’s hard to put him in a box and say “he should put his head down and just take the 2 yards that are right in front of him” when we’ve all seen this guy break off big runs by making his own lane with his footwork and quickness. But at the end of the day, when his output has been as low as it has been for two weeks in a row, you start to wonder if maybe taking those couple of yards is the way to go rather than to keep losing yards trying to run wide.
The good news is that Johnson is back from his suspension and should take his old spot at right tackle. In a few more weeks, Mathis should also be back on the field. That should start to open things up at least a little for McCoy.
Rookie receiver Jordan Matthews has the potential to become a legitimate deep threat, so as he develops, opposing defenses may not be able to play as much single-high safety as they are right now.
A guy as talented as Shady hasn’t suddenly forgotten how to run the ball, so I would imagine he will get back to hitting the holes hard soon enough.
Put it all together and I would still keep my hopes high that LeSean McCoy will bounce back for a productive season. At 3-1, the Eagles had better hope he can because they will need him to be “the guy” again, quickly, if they plan on making it back to the playoffs.
| Rushing | Receiving | |||||||||||
| G# | Date | Opp | Result | Att | Yds | Y/A | TD | Rec | Tgt | Yds | Y/R | TD |
| 1 | 9/7/2014 | JAX | W 34-17 | 21 | 74 | 3.52 | 0 | 6 | 6 | 41 | 6.83 | 0 |
| 2 | 9/15/2014 | at IND | W 30-27 | 20 | 79 | 3.95 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 23 | 5.75 | 0 |
| 3 | 9/21/2014 | WAS | W 37-34 | 19 | 22 | 1.16 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | |
| 4 | 9/28/2014 | at SF | L 21-26 | 10 | 17 | 1.7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| 70 | 192 | 2.74 | 1 | 10 | 13 | 64 | 6.4 | 0 |
Stats via Pro Football Reference
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