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Up to Chip Kelly to fix Eagles' offense

Rivals have figured out the offense, and the coach has to make adjustments.

LANDOVER, Md. - Let's not overcomplicate things. This offseason, Chip Kelly set out to build a team with a certain identity. He agreed to pay the NFL's rushing leader $8 million per year to join his backfield. He added a second power runner who was a feature back with his previous team. He traded for a quarterback who was not supposed to carry the fortunes of the team on his shoulders.

Four weeks of an NFL season is more than enough time to suggest that the Eagles are not capable of being the team that Kelly envisioned. He can talk all he wants about the need to execute - and he did, at length, on multiple occasions yesterday - but the Eagles are a quarter of the way through their 2015 schedule. They are halfway to a loss total that last season precluded them from the playoffs. The sample is more than large enough for the coach to start considering the possibility that his players are not capable of executing whatever he is asking of them.

"We need to play better" is not a valid prescription at this juncture, not after a month of training camp and four preseason games and four weeks of regular-season competition. We are at a point where it is foolish to expect that the talent on the field will suddenly become what it has not yet been. There are no magic beans.

The only variable is the scheme, and Kelly would be wise to start varying it. The well-oiled machine from his first season is not rolling out of that tunnel. That's not the way it works in the NFL. The league adjusts to you, and you adjust back, and then the league adjusts to your adjustments, and then you adjust again. You do not continue to play the way you've always played, as if the football field is some sort of vacuum where a player's ability to execute exists entirely within himself; as if the 11 guys on the opposite side of the ball have nothing to do with said ability, as if the coach of those 11 guys isn't equally capable of putting them into positions where all they need to do is execute.

The struggles that we witnessed during the first three games were the same as the struggles we witnessed yesterday. Apart from a 30-yard run by DeMarco Murray and a 14-yard scramble by Sam Bradford, the Eagles rushed for a grand total of 43 yards on 16 carries. In four games, they have gained a total of 280 yards on the ground, putting them on pace to finish the season with 1,120 rushing yards, which would be the fewest by any NFL team since 2000, when the Chargers finished with 1,062 yards and the Browns with 1,085.

Maybe these individual linemen are historically bad. But their track records suggest that isn't the case: Jason Peters clearly has been hampered physically this season, and Jason Kelce and Lane Johnson clearly have underperformed the standards they have set for themselves, and Allen Barbre and Matt Tobin clearly have played like career second- and third-stringers. Even if these really are bad players, or good players playing bad football, is it really a once-in-a-generation kind of bad?

It seems far more plausible that the scheme itself has depreciated to a point where coordinators understand how to disrupt whatever it is that it asks its players to do. Is it a coincidence that as the Eagles were kicking off against the Redskins, a Dolphins offense run by Kelly acolyte Bill Lazor was finishing off its fourth straight week of ineptitude? Like the Eagles, Miami got no production from its running backs, who carried the ball a total of eight times for 26 yards. In four games, the Dolphins have a grand total of 277 yards on the ground, three fewer than the Eagles. Bill Musgrave, who replaced Lazor as the Eagles' quarterbacks coach before moving on to Oakland as offensive coordinator, has called an offense that has failed to reach 100 yards rushing in three of its first four games, including yesterday's loss to the Bears, when Oakland gained 70 yards on 22 carries. In the Raiders' first game, their backs carried the ball 15 times for 55 yards, and in their second game they gained 74 yards on 17 carries. Those numbers probably sound familiar.

Understandably, the players think themselves up to their tasks. Kelce labeled the offensive line's performance "a disgrace" yesterday.

"It's just very, very frustrating that we're not putting our guys in better positions," the center said. "There's just way too many mistakes, way too many errors, especially at this point in the season. We're costing our team wins right now, I think. We've got to get this fixed. We should've had it fixed yesterday. We should've had it fixed right from the beginning."

Or maybe it was dead on arrival. Maybe a certain amount of faulty execution should be expected in the NFL. Maybe that margin for error is not built into this Eagles offense. Maybe the flaws we are witnessing are fundamental flaws, flaws that point not to faulty execution but a faulty plan. Take five random offensive linemen from anywhere on an NFL depth chart and they should be able to get you 3 yards on the ground more often than not. The Eagles' near-total inability to gain even a yard or 2 on the ground when they line up and run the ball is not a normal thing. Even the five least-talented linemen in the NFL shouldn't be this bad. There is something wrong with this scheme, and every week that Kelly ignores it is another week that he ignores the fundamental reality of the NFL: You will be figured out, and once you are, then we'll start to find out whether you were ever any good.