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Eagles' painful execution

Head coach Chip Kelly needs to realize that injured players can't produce as well as healthy ones.

LANE JOHNSON has a sprained MCL, a sprained ankle, and 300-plus pounds of body weight pressing down on both of them. What he doesn't have is a choice.

"We ain't got nobody else," the right tackle said yesterday as he sat in his locker with a towel around his waist.

That's an admirable stance, and we should mention right away that Johnson is a tough dude who is one of the three things that we would take to a deserted island with us (the other two: a water purifier and a Kam Chancellor highlight tape). But you can't help but wonder if his coach understands that he might need to help a brother out come Sunday. For all of Chip Kelly's talk about the need to execute, he has never acknowledged that execution rarely gets easier as the season progresses, or that the roster he has at his disposal after four weeks of wear and tear is, in all likelihood, less capable of achieving the perfection he seeks than the one that faced the Falcons in the first week of the season.

Take the situation on the offensive line, for example. While Johnson is clearly not a normal human being, he is still subject to certain constraints imposed by the physiological design of the human body. And it seems reasonable to assume that a player who is battling injuries to two load-bearing joints will not be able to execute all of the things that you would normally ask him to.

By the end of Sunday's loss to the Redskins, the Eagles had an offensive line that featured a guard who entered the game as a backup, a left tackle who entered the game as a backup guard, and a right tackle who earlier in the game was writhing on the ground in pain after somebody rolled up on his leg during a PAT attempt. Even if Jason Peters is able to play with a quad injury, it is pretty clear that he hasn't been physically right for most of the season, and there is no reason to expect that he will suddenly play like a young gazelle against the Saints this weekend.

Same goes for Johnson, who yesterday extolled the virtues and efficacy of the painkillers he will pump himself full of prior to Sunday's start time.

"We've got a bye week coming up in a few weeks, so I'll have some time to heal then," Johnson said. "Other than that, I'm just going to roll with the punches. Whatever happens happens."

The Chip-Kelly-as-football-robot trope is unfair and perhaps not even accurate (I'm pretty sure none of us know the guy well enough to make broad declarations about his soul). But the more he talks, the more you wonder whether he truly does understand the difference between the pure theory of football and its application. On the one hand, you feel silly for even suggesting that he might not. Kelly is a smart guy. He appreciates information. You have to think that somewhere in his data are numbers that show that an offensive line operating at X percent of capacity might require a different game plan than one operating at full health.

On the other hand, everything you hear from the head coach and his assistants and their players suggests they all truly believe that the show rolls on, regardless of the capabilities of its actors.

This isn't about any one aspect of the Eagles' usual attack. But let's consider the whole tempo thing for a moment. Yesterday, offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur was asked whether players who are playing through pain, or who are playing new positions, might benefit from more of a break between plays. The logic seems pretty indisputable: the "R" in RICE does not stand for "Ramp up the intensity of the workload on the injured body part." It stands for rest. And it stands to reason that the more of it a guy like Johnson can get in between reps, the more effective he might be during the actual rep.

Similarly, if Matt Tobin ends up starting at left tackle for Peters, is Kelly really maximizing his potential to perform by forcing him to perform (and think) at a breakneck pace? You never hear coaches talk about the need to speed the game up for a young player. You never hear them say, "Everything just seems like it is moving in fast-forward for him right now. It's a beautiful thing to watch."

Shurmur does not subscribe to this logic.

"We train our guys to play at the pace that we play," the offensive coordinator said yesterday. "When they go in as backups and become starters, they're aware of it and they know how to line up. I guess if guys were doing the wrong thing all the time that would be a concern. You know, but no."

For what it's worth, I asked both Johnson and Tobin yesterday whether the tempo at which the Eagles play makes it more difficult to perform in their given situations (Johnson playing through pain, Tobin thrust into a new position).

"I'm so used to doing it," said Johnson, who was Kelly's first-ever draft pick. "It's the deal, you have to roll with the punches."

"It's the deal now," said Tobin, who signed as a rookie free agent during the 2013 offseason. "It's been that way since I got into the NFL."

It's worth noting that neither of them said, "No."

Blog: ph.ly/HighCheese