Even in big win, Foles is nowhere near perfect

It was just 11 months ago that Nick Foles had become a sensation, throwing seven touchdown passes in one game, coming out of nowhere to run Chip Kelly's offense with calmness and precision and such care for the football. So reporters started calling Derek Long for answers and insight, because Long had coached Foles at Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, and if anyone could account for Foles' rapid rise into a possible franchise quarterback, maybe an old coach who knew him well could.

One day last November, Long answered his home phone and spoke of how the environment in which Foles had grown up had likely shaped him. From those bright, brilliant lights on Friday nights, to Texas and TCU and A&M and Tech on Saturdays, to the Cowboys and Texans on Sundays, Foles' life was a full-time immersion in a football-mad state's culture - its pressures, its expectations, its models for how to handle those pressures and expectations. That culture, Long said, had prepared Foles for what he would face in the NFL - and, Long added with a chuckle, what he would face in Philadelphia with the Eagles.

"Y'all got some evil fans," he said. "Y'all make the UT fans down here look like they're ice-cream eaters."

Like any good joke, Long's one-liner contained a good bit of truth. All anyone wants up here from the Eagles' starting quarterback is perfection, and after a season in which Foles came closer than any in franchise history, his performance this year has been a cause for relative concern.

The Eagles' 27-0 rout of the Giants on Sunday night was perhaps the perfect synopsis of Foles' season through six games. Through the game's first 281/2 minutes, he was the quarterback everyone had grown accustomed to seeing in 2013, even if no one quite believed his or her own eyes: 14 completions in 20 attempts, 177 yards, and two touchdowns, including a gorgeous 15-yard scoring strike to tight end Zach Ertz.

But his 21st pass was an inexcusable error, an interception with the Eagles on the Giants' 16-yard line, a sideline dump-off on which Foles somehow never saw cornerback Antrel Rolle standing right in front of Darren Sproles.

Early in the third quarter, he made a similar mistake, loping to his right, throwing late, his pass drifting into the belly of Giants cornerback Zach Bowman. It was Foles' 10th turnover, the most in the league, and his seventh interception. He finished Sunday with respectable numbers - 21 for 34, 248 yards, two touchdowns - and Foles dismissed the two interceptions as the by-product of aggressiveness.

"I made a couple of dumb mistakes with the football that I will work on," he said. "I can fix those things. They're not over my head."

Still, there was a feeling that even more was possible from Foles, and he didn't deliver it. Aside from that victory over the Washington Redskins last month, when Foles showed his mettle by shrugging off a succession of hellacious hits, that feeling has lingered since Week 1. Come off a season in which you throw 27 touchdown passes and just two interceptions, and every errant pass, every moment of uncertainty with the football, will be magnified. Nevertheless, Foles has gone from being a quarterback who was trustworthy with the ball in his hands to one prone to foolish plays.

"We still have to do a better job from that standpoint, from a turnover standpoint, and he'll be the first to tell you that," Kelly said. "The one at the end of the first half, I think he was trying to throw it away. He just didn't get it out of bounds. And then he was scrambling on the second one, and we've just got to do a better job of protecting the football. . . . You can't continue to do it at that rate and end up on the right side of the ledger."

Foles, then, will have to use the bye week to rest his battered body and think through those corrections. Opponents are defending the Eagles' offense differently this season, mostly for two reasons: DeSean Jackson isn't here anymore, and Foles still is. Teams will challenge Foles to beat them until he has a few spectacular games. They won't display the same silly judgment that the Giants did Sunday in playing both the pass and the run honestly, allowing LeSean McCoy to get free for 149 yards. They'll dare Foles to be as precise and productive as he was last season, and they'll bank that he can't do it, that he'll keep making mistakes.

This is a town that wants to wrap its arms around a quarterback, that wants to believe in Foles. No, he doesn't actually need to be perfect. But he does have to restore that calm competence that, in Kelly's system, can lead to fireworks. The Eagles are 5-1, tied for first place, but their quarterback should understand by now: The pressure, now matter how prepared he might be for it, never goes away.

"He's our starter," offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur said last week. "We don't judge him so much."

Around here, in a place where ice cream is for those softies down South, they're the only ones.

@MikeSielski