The top five offenses of the NFL are as follows: New Orleans, New England, Green Bay, Philadelphia, and Carolina.

The rankings for defense of those teams are: NO(27), NE(32), GB(31), PHI(11), Car(24). So the question becomes what in the world are the Eagles doing to be 4th in offense 11th in defense and still so bad? Ok, that's not really my question, but I did start to wonder why these other 3 teams enjoy such a good offense and get to also enjoy such a good win/loss record. Surely special teams can't simply be the excuse for all of this mess right?

I started looking through the rest of the statistics, and I noticed something else about the top 5 I have listed above. Points per game: NO(31.9), NE(30.5) GB(35.8), PHI(22.8) Car(24.1) We're getting close to the amount of yards as the rest of these teams, why are we almost a touchdown behind the top 3?

Was it turnovers? Somewhat yes: NO(-2), NE(+9), GB(+20!), PHI(-12), Car(-5) As you can see, New Orleans is at a -2 turnover ratio and manage to do pretty good, those extra three turnovers we have certainly doesn't explain why they are 10-3 and we are 4-9.

Maybe it was special teams. Jason Baker is ranked 26th in the league, and that does kill us on field position. However, Mare does kick a lot of touchbacks negating long kickoff returns, (I'll refrain from going into his missed FGs; we've all discussed that at length enough this week) and Pilares ranks 5th in kickoff return averages at the moment. Our special teams needs work but it's not the sole reason we can't win games.

Then of course we have penalties. We're currently ranked 27th in the league right now, and it seems we've made some pretty significant improvements from earlier this year(Minus Jordan Pugh), we're a young team that will learn discipline in time.

So it must be coaching right? I do believe it is a part of the problem, but I won't sit here and critique someone when I have access to so little information that they do.

What I think it all comes down to is a mixture of everything, and I'm not choosing the easy all of the above answer just to finish all of this typing. I think if Green Bay can be 3rd in offense and 31st in defense and be 13-0, then we should be able to be somewhat worse in offense (by 2) and a lot better on defense (by 7) and be close to the same record. We're honestly just not mature enough as a team. Stupid things like turnovers, penalties, poor tackling, not so great special teams, and questionable coaching calls are making us seem so much worse than we are.

I'm still excited about the future, I still hit 100% everytime the fan confidence poll pops up, and I'm okay with a rebuilding season, because I suffered through last year and I can make it through this one. I just know that regardless of our record there is not a single team in the NFL that would want to face us right now, and that feels good. So everyone step back from the ledge, enjoy the next 3 games, and hope the experience everyone is getting will finally click.

BTW, I got all of the statistics off of ESPN stats page http://espn.go.com/nfl/statistics if you want to look around for yourself.