By Mary Cunningham
Eagle center Jason Kelce became a hero to every fan last Feb. 8 when he donned a Mummer’s costume and gave a world-class shout-out to the fans and Philly at the Birds Super parade.
He’s a stand-up guy.
And now he is standing up and taking responsibility for the Eagles’ devastating 21-17 loss to the Panthers after blowing a 17-0 fourth-quarter lead.
Kelce, who declined to speak after the loss on Sunday, on Tuesday raised his hand implicating the offense:
Obviously, everybody is embarrassed of the outcome. The reality is, offensively we had numerous times to put that team out of their misery, numerous examples in the red zone to get touchdowns. If you really look at the four losses we’ve had this year, outside of maybe Tampa Bay, we get one touchdown more a game and we’re winning all of these games. That’s the reality of it.
Our failure to execute in the red zone, our failure to put the ball in the end zone, our failure to come away with points, turnovers, penalties, [missed assignments], all of these things have culminated into making these games close. And when games are close, you can lose games. That’s what’s happened to us this year. We just gotta get that corrected. That’s the bottom line.
I think the obvious glaring weakness to me … people can talk about the pass defense and all that stuff all they want, but the reality is, 17 points in this league isn’t good enough to win a game. We gotta do better than that. We gotta do better for our defense, we gotta do better for this team.
