The Philadelphia Eagles announced that quarterback Carson Wentz is finally poised to make his 2018 NFL season debut. Now comes the matter of how head coach Doug Pederson is going to game plan around him.
The Eagles have been cautious with Wentz's return from the torn ACL he suffered last season. However, Pederson says he will have no limitations for his star quarterback this week, via Josh Alper of Pro Football Talk:
“Think about the game yesterday,” Pederson said, via a transcript of his press conference. “How many times did Nick get hit? It’s part of the game. The thing is I’m not going to coach scared. I’m not going to coach paranoid. I’m not going to go in thinking, ‘Oh no, we can’t do ‘this’, we can’t do ‘that’.’ We just have to continue to go play and I [have] to coach that way. That’s where the confidence with the team comes, by doing that. If there’s opportunities to max the protection and do some things there, we’ll do that by game plans, by design. But I don’t think that things are going to change too much.”
Pederson's comments should come as no surprise. He literally wrote about emphasizing how important it is to not be conservative as evidenced by his play-calling in Super Bowl LII. That said, it would be unusual for him to start now. This is especially true considering Wentz'aggressiveve playing style.
Although he had not suffered any setbacks during his healing process, Philadelphia still decided to play it safe by starting the 2018 NFL season with quarterback Nick Foles under center. The move made sense for a number of reasons. Having the Super Bowl MVP fill in as a viable option while Wentz got back to 100 percent could pay huge dividends for them down the line.
The Eagles suffered their first loss of the 2018 campaign at the hands of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They will have a chance to get back into the win column when they host the Indianapolis Colts in Week 3.
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