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Murphy: Eagles need playmakers

FOOTBALL'S complexities are a big part of the sport's appeal. The conversation lasts all year because there are a year's worth of angles to discuss. With 53-man rosters and 22-man starting lineups and a smorgasbord of play-calling philosophies and a salary cap to boot, there is always another variable to consider, to dissect, to project, to evaluate.

Eagles tight end Zach Ertz catches first of two touchdown passes against the Cowboys on Sunday.
Eagles tight end Zach Ertz catches first of two touchdown passes against the Cowboys on Sunday.Read moreMatt Rourke / AP Photo

FOOTBALL'S complexities are a big part of the sport's appeal. The conversation lasts all year because there are a year's worth of angles to discuss. With 53-man rosters and 22-man starting lineups and a smorgasbord of play-calling philosophies and a salary cap to boot, there is always another variable to consider, to dissect, to project, to evaluate.

Yet with the Eagles' 27-13 win over the Cowboys on Sunday came a reminder that we sometimes make this sport more complex than it needs to be. All of the other things that determine success and failure are built on a simple foundation: Your guy vs. my guy, man vs. man, who's got the better player? A football game is 10 or 11 of these matchups playing out in unison. Win a majority of them, and you win the game.

Go back and rewatch the Eagles' regular-season finale from this perspective and jot down what you see. Watch tight end Zach Ertz's 13 catches for 139 yards and two touchdowns and note the names of the defenders they came against. Do the same on Dorial Green-Beckham's 15-yard catch in the third quarter, and also his drop of an easy first-down catch on the next play. Watch rookie third-round draft pick Isaac Seumalo lose his balance and give up a 6-yard tackle for loss to reserve defensive end Jack Crawford.

What happened? It's a question that was on a lot of lips at various junctures of the season. What happened to the Eagles team that started the season 3-0? What happened to the Vinny Curry and Mychal Kendricks the Eagles drafted? What happened to Ertz - a second-round draft pick - in all the games before the last one?

Perhaps nothing happened to any of them. They were who they were and they remain who they are: a team with too many players whose production falls at or near the middle of the bell curve, a team whose fate is thus completely dependent on the talent level of its opposition. In the win over the Cowboys, Ertz's second touchdown catch came against man coverage by linebacker Andrew Gachkar, who has nine starts in six seasons since the Chargers took him in the seventh round of the 2011 draft, with over-the-top help provided by special-teamer Jeff Heath, a former undrafted free agent who is Dallas' version of Chris Maragos. Against back-up-quality competition, Ertz looked like the player people always thought he could be. Problem is, that's the kind of player Travis Kelce looked like against the Broncos' first-teamers a couple of weeks ago while helping the Chiefs secure another playoff berth for Andy Reid. The Eagles drafted Ertz one round before the Chiefs drafted Kelce. This offseason, the Eagles signed Ertz to a contract extension similar to the one Kelce eventually signed. Ertz is a player who can dominate against a middle-of-the-road defense's second-stringers. Kelce is a player who can dominate against an elite defense's starters.

Therein lies the great mystery of the Eagles' oft-denied but now evident rebuild: Do they even know what they're trying to build?

"This is when we begin the evaluation process," Doug Pederson said after Sunday's win. "We're going to evaluate our current players. We're going to spend time the next few days doing that while everything is kind of fresh in our mind. We'll just begin our scheme (evaluation), go back offensively, defensively and special teams, start looking back on the season and seeing where we can improve our scheme."

In order to know what they need, they need to know what they have, and they haven't really thrived in that department as of late. In Curry, they thought they had a premier edge rusher, and so they gave him a contract extension that will make him one of the league's highest-paid defensive ends next season. He played fewer than 50 percent of the team's defensive snaps this season, which was nearly twice as many as Kendricks played one year after signing his own contract extension.

Pederson, of course, was not privy to any of these decisions. Nor was Joe Douglas, the team's new personnel boss. The Eagles have a lot of decisions to make. How big of a hole would be left by Bennie Logan's departure? Is Seumalo competent enough to pencil in as starter next season? Is a Halapoulivaati Vaitai an NFL-caliber tackle? What is Jalen Mills' optimal NFL role?

"I mean, again, it goes back to how we evaluate and how we handle our team going forward," Pederson said. "But listen, it's a situation where maybe it's just a matter of we just need to coach better. You know, we've got to look at ourselves as coaches and make sure we're putting these guys, if it's the same group, just that we're making the right decisions for these guys and we're putting them in the right positions. A lot of it, too, can fall on us as coaches to make these decisions for our players. At the end of the day, do you need players? Yeah, you need players, but those guys in the locker room, they fought all year long, and I'm proud of those guys."

That's the mentality you'd expect from a coach. But as the Eagles shift into evaluation mode, they can't allow familiarity to taint their analyses. They need the kinds of playmakers who can win matchups against Cowboys starters, or else the future will hold plenty more meaningless Week 17s to dominate.

@ByDavidMurphy

Blog:philly.com/Philliesblog