How the Eagles Turned Nick Foles Into Carson Wentz

“Not a lot of people know this,” Philadelphia Eagles quarterbacks coach John DeFilippo told me. “But the backup quarterback in the NFL gets zero reps with the starters. Zero.”

This is how much experience Foles got with the Eagles starters before Carson Wentz’s season-ending injury in Week 14. When you consider how little time he had to prepare to take over the offense, how little football he’d played in the past two years, and how he’d completely fallen out of the NFL’s collective consciousness until six weeks ago, Foles’s emergence in the playoffs as an efficient quarterback is a small, modern football miracle. It’s a triumph of both coaching and playing.

Foles is not Wentz—he was at no point the presumptive MVP, and he does not have the mobility or the skill set to do almost anything on the football field at any time. But given the circumstances, Foles’s performance has been the best that the Eagles could’ve hoped for.

The Eagles will play in the Super Bowl on Sunday, not because of Foles but not despite him, either. In the NFC championship game against the Minnesota Vikings, he became the fourth quarterback this millennium to throw for 300 yards, three touchdowns, and no interceptions in a conference title game; Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, and Matt Ryan were the others. Against the Patriots, Foles has a legitimate chance to become the first quarterback to win a Super Bowl after starting the season as a backup since … the guy he’s playing against on Sunday.

Against Minnesota, the league’s best defense by yards per game, he completed a remarkable 78.8 percent of his throws, after completing 76.7 percent the week before against Atlanta. He is throwing shorter passes than Wentz, but he’s been an efficiency machine in these playoffs—thanks to a mixture of a great offensive game plan, gifted skill-position players, a sturdy offensive line, and Foles himself making the throws he’s asked to make. Foles might not be elite, but the infrastructure around him is.

Six years after the collective bargaining agreement severely limited training-camp and in-season padded practices, one of the defining features of the modern NFL is coaches griping about not having enough training time to get quarterbacks ready over the course of multiple years. To turn Foles into a solid starter with a month of in-season preparation is another thing altogether.

The Eagles offense often relies on what coaches call “faith throws.” It’s when a quarterback chucks the ball downfield before anything looks like it might be developing and, yes, has faith that, say, the tight end will break in his route and immediately separate from his safety. It is not an unusual throw in the NFL, but they’re hard to pull off frequently because of the rapport that needs to be built up between the quarterback and his receivers. DeFilippo has talked about Foles’s ability to hit these faith throws, pointing to them as evidence that the dude can play, but more than anything, it’s a testament to how quickly the team jelled behind its backup once Wentz went down.

The opposite of the faith throw in the Eagles offense is the “relief throw,” which is, as the name suggests, a much easier pass to complete. In the red zone, Philadelphia also has what’s called “touchdown or checkdown,” which means you’re either throwing a touchdown or you’re throwing a high-percentage pass. It is not all-or-nothing, exactly; it’s more like all-or-something-very-little.

Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images

“Nick missed all of training camp. He didn’t play a lot. He didn’t play in Kansas City last year,” DeFilippo said. Foles, of course, had a career year in 2013, making the Pro Bowl after hurling 27 touchdown passes for Chip Kelly’s Eagles. But he struggled in subsequent years, turning in a 77.4 passer rating from 2014 to 2016. So there was rust, as evidenced by his two sub-70-passer-rating games in December. “From a footwork standpoint a little bit, a pocket standpoint, I think that takes some feel,” DeFilippo said. “I think that the last couple of weeks, you’ve seen him move more in the pocket, whereas he was maybe getting rid of the ball a little too quick against the Raiders [in December].”

One of the brilliant, if obvious, maneuvers the coaching staff has made since Wentz went down was to ask Foles to throw the ball quickly and not as far down the field. Foles is averaging 2 fewer air yards per pass than Wentz—a huge disparity in the modern NFL—as 40 percent of Wentz’s passes went beyond 10 yards, and only 25 percent of Foles’s do. In these playoffs, Foles has thrown his average pass in 2.42 seconds—less time than any other player in the playoffs. A full 60 percent of his passes have come in 2.5 seconds or less—better than Tom Brady by 1.1 percent. And on those throws of 2.5 seconds or less, he completes 87.2 percent of his passes—again, the best mark of any playoff quarterback.

This, of course, is all by design, because these coaches—featuring former NFL quarterbacks at head coach and offensive coordinator—are pretty damn good. It is a thoroughly modern coaching staff. The offense relies on run-pass options and, in some cases, analytics for game planning. DeFilippo has discussed how the Eagles like throwing to the back of the end zone in the red zone because it’s the least defended part of the field. He confirmed to me that the team uses analytics as a piece of its game planning in that regard, running the numbers on opponent tendencies to figure out which spots on the field might be vulnerable—though they still rely far more on game tape in that regard. Tight ends coach Justin Peelle told me that Philadelphia’s coaches get the numbers and use them in game planning, but don’t necessarily bog their players down with the raw data. ”We never explain to them ‘35 percent of the time, the team will do whatever.’ We have to make it simple for them,” Peelle said. “I don’t get into the numbers because I don’t want them thinking. I just want them to run their routes to win.” The Eagles have also already confirmed their analytical approach when it comes to going for it on fourth down, and no other team converted more fourth downs this season.

Whether they are using numbers, tape, or some sort of magic, the Eagles are as efficient a team as there is in the league. Wentz’s numbers on third down and in the red zone were legendary. And Foles has been efficient there, too. It’s a small sample size, sure, but the Eagles lead all playoff teams in third-down conversion percentage at 59.3.

Great play-calling or analytics is one thing, but Foles still needed practice reps—lots of them. So, Doug Pederson had his team use its playoff bye week to make up for lost time. Tight end Zach Ertz said the practices during the bye week were “pretty much training camp practices,” in which starters played against starters (which doesn’t happen very often in the NFL). Ertz was matched up against star safety Malcolm Jenkins, which meant Foles got more and more reps simulating game speed.

“A lot of it is the trust, and that comes with reps,” Peelle said about Foles feeling more comfortable in things as dicey as faith throws. “The reps the wide receivers and tight ends get with the quarterbacks. You learn, ‘OK, that doesn’t look clean now, but I know my guy is going to be there.’ And the receiver it’s learning, ‘I’ve got to get here because my guy is going to get me the ball here.’” It also helps that players like Ertz are incredibly good at getting open:

I asked DeFilippo if he still feels comfortable calling any play that he called with Wentz, and he said that he 100 percent does. Obviously, the statistics show they’ve trended toward a quicker-passing game, but over the past two weeks, Foles has made the best out of one of the best playbooks in the league, showing he’s capable of running a diverse set of plays. He is not Wentz, but he does not have to be.

“When we saw Carson went down, we knew something was going on. I saw him limping around. It looked like he’d just gotten landed on. I’m upstairs so I wasn’t sure,” DeFilippo said. “But no coach panicked, no player panicked, no one panicked because Nick conducted himself like a starter all year.”