Four Verts: Eagles should be on red alert, and Tommy DeVito makes good after getting flexed on by a pizza shop

There are three weeks left in the NFL regular season. Can you feel it? Everyone is clenched up, and while some teams have already been forced into their 2024 offseason plans, for others, the hunt toward the Super Bowl and playoffs starts now.

Eagles blew a golden opportunity and look to be in trouble

The Eagles should be on red alert after their 20-17 loss to Drew Lock and the Seahawks. The past few weeks of the season haven’t been kind to the Eagles, as they hit a three-game losing streak in which they were demolished by both the 49ers and Cowboys before losing a close one Monday night. For a team with Super Bowl aspirations, this is an alarming trend, and their recent performances show that this team is probably not as good as last year’s.

Despite having a 10-4 record, the Eagles have a point differential of plus-18. They’ve been scraping by and playing close games all season, which has merit when they win, but even that fact is indicative of overall team quality. In terms of point differential, the Eagles are sandwiched between the Browns (+20) and Rams (+17), two teams that are still very much fighting for their postseason lives.

Philadelphia has already clinched a playoff spot, due an exceedingly weak NFC this year, but they’re pretty flawed for a team that’s still technically in play for the top overall seed. The offense hasn’t been as effective as it was a year ago, when it was running through every team in the league, and the pass defense has fallen off a cliff, prompting the team to inexplicably make Matt Patricia the defensive play-caller for the rest of the season. It’s tough to imagine this team making another run to the Super Bowl, but it is possible, considering the amount of top-tier talent the Eagles still have on the roster.

The Eagles have two big danger zones right now. First is the middle of their defense, which is falling apart as they struggle to find any semblance of linebacker or safety play. They struggle to defend the run, and when they run into a team such as the 49ers that has multiple ways to dominate the middle of the field, they’re cooked. That’s not really something they can fix before the end of the year.

Second is the play of their quarterback, Jalen Hurts. He has really struggled to find answers this season, with former offensive coordinator Shane Steichen departing for the Colts' head-coaching job. Hurts has become turnover-prone, and some of his problems making the entire field viable from a pass-target perspective have hurt the Eagles and their offensive efficiency.

There’s still time to turn the second part of this around if Hurts and new offensive coordinator Brian Johnson can just get on the same page as to how to make this offense work. There’s no reason an offensive line and skill group this good should be struggling to get past 20 points against a team such as the Seahawks. Hurts is locked in for the future contract-wise, so hopefully this is just a shaky trend and not what Hurts is going to be as the Eagles continue to figure out how to build around him.

The ultimate test is coming up as the Eagles try to get back to the Super Bowl, but right now, they don’t look ready for the challenge.

Tommy DeVito’s pizza escapade is the story we all needed

Tommy, Tommy, Tommy. Giants quarterback Tommy DeVito hit a snag with his newfound fame when his agent, Sean Stellato, tried to double his appearance fee for a local pizza restaurant following his comeback on "Monday Night Football" against the Packers. The response was obviously one of distaste, causing DeVito to not only get a new marketing agent for these kinds of deals but also do the appearance for free to make amends. Good on Tommy, but this is a hilarious case of having too much dip on your chip and pushing boundaries too far.

Unless DeVito has rapid development in how he plays the game, he’s going to end up as a backup and journeyman quarterback. That’s a good place for him to be, given that he started the season as an undrafted rookie free agent, but this is a valuable lesson in learning not to push people too far. It’s one thing to get off on a corporate brand that has infinite money to blow and wouldn’t care about an extra $10,000, but the mom-and-pop shops near his hometown might not be able to take that hit.

The funniest part of this whole interaction was the pizza shop, Coniglio's Old Fashioned, posting an old video they had with Eli Manning when Stellato asked for the increased fee. That’s a heady play by the family business, showing DeVito and the gang that he’s not the first Giants quarterback to stroll through — and certainly not the best.

This is all in good fun because DeVito quickly made amends and did the appearance for free, but these situations in which someone pushes in their cards a smidge too far always tickle the soul. This is a heartwarming story for DeVito. Don’t ruin it, Sean! He still needs to come home to his parents and be seen in his community. Let’s keep it cooler around the pizza shops.

Josh Allen and Dak Prescott both suffered a hit in the MVP race

Josh Allen and Dak Prescott have easily been two of the most valuable players in the league this year, guiding both of their teams with exceptional quarterback play. Unfortunately for them, both of their MVP odds might've taken a hit in the Bills' 31-10 win over the Cowboys on Sunday. Prescott had an uncharacteristically bad performance, struggling to get much of anything going in the passing game, while the Bills didn’t need Allen to do anything to pummel the Cowboys into submission.

Allen threw only 15 passes while James Cook stole the show, totaling 221 yards from scrimmage and two touchdowns during the blowout win. As Allen noted after the game, this is not a bad thing for the Bills. With their playoff hopes out of their own hands at this point, they need to stack any win they can get, no matter how it looks. For Allen’s individual hopes, he needed to keep stacking gaudy performance lines to help his own MVP cause, which is already going to be tough to achieve considering his team’s record.

Prescott, who has been superb this season, had one of those games that his detractors love to hold against him. Turnovers, sloppy play, faltering against a top opponent — he hit the bingo card of a rough Prescott loss. The rest of the offense struggled with Prescott, and they were able to muster only 10 points and fewer than 200 total yards. They had fewer yards as a team than Cook had from scrimmage! That’s going to be held against Prescott without a doubt, unless he goes on an absolute tear over the final three games of the season (not impossible given what he has produced this season.)

The biggest problem for both of these guys is that Brock Purdy, Kyle Shanahan and the rest of the Avengers in 49ers gear are hacking their way through NFL defenses. While Allen and Prescott were playing around in the mud, Purdy threw another four touchdowns against the Cardinals and is producing on an efficiency level that hasn’t really been seen before. Debating how much of it is Purdy and how much of it is the rest of the team can be a column all by itself, but the facts are that quarterbacks with this level of efficiency almost always win MVP.

It’s not over for Prescott and Allen, but they did take a step back in a way that might cost them the award.

The Browns and Joe Flacco are doing something amazing

It’s almost 2024. Through injuries and general poor play at quarterback, the Browns have ended up with 38-year-old Joe Flacco as their quarterback as they enter a crucial stretch to try to make the playoffs. The Browns currently hold the fifth seed in the AFC, which didn’t seem possible given their quarterback play this year. However, the Browns’ defense has still been one of the stingiest units in the league, and something magical is happening on the other side of the ball: Flacco is actually giving them the best quarterback play they’ve had all season.

Of course, that is an extremely low bar. Deshaun Watson, P.J. Walker and Dorian Thompson-Robinson all produced middling results, but the Browns’ defense had been so dominant that it didn’t matter. Flacco isn’t out here producing like he’s one of the best quarterbacks in the league, but he’s doing a good enough job to keep the Browns in games and even giving them a chance to win, like he did this past weekend against the Bears. His clutch throw to Amari Cooper at the end of the game was a caliber of throw the Browns haven’t seen all year, and his precision and accuracy on the play allowed Cooper to get into the end zone.

This is what the Browns have needed from their quarterback room this season: someone who can make just enough big plays to give the defense the support it needs. Flacco has made his fair share of mistakes (he hasn’t exactly done the greatest job taking care of the ball), but he still has the physical ability to flip a game on its head with one play. The margins are thin with Flacco as the quarterback, but they feel a bit wider than the previous weeks of the season, when the Browns were just hoping someone would step forward with productive quarterback play.

If the playoffs were to start today, the Browns would head to Jacksonville to take on the Jaguars — a team they beat a couple of weeks ago, thanks to three touchdowns thrown by Flacco. It’s hard to play stifling defense week in and week out and continuously win in 2023 — finding the variance that Flacco brings can be useful to the Browns (or horrifically end their season in the playoffs if the pendulum swings the other way.)

All the Browns needed was a chance to get into the playoffs, which they have with their unlikely hero at the helm. The final three weeks of the season will dictate what their expectations should be for the playoffs, but as things stand right now, they should at least be able to compete in the wild-card round. That’s a victory with the way this season has turned out for them at quarterback, and somehow, Joe Flacco in 2023 has been a piece of their solution.