Eagles Expected To Enjoy Mini-Bye, Except Perhaps One Player

Once a kicker climbs into his head after a critical miss or two, it’s over. What he finds between the ears usually isn’t pretty, with doubt and questions lurking in one corner, and disbelief in another.

It’s not just kickers, but athletes in other sports, such as golf, where putters can develop a case of the yips, and baseball, where second baseman Chuck Knoblauch suddenly forgot how to throw to first base.

As the Eagles enjoy their mini-bye after a Week 11 win over the Washington Commanders on Thursday night, Jake Elliott will try to keep out of his head.

“I feel like I’ve done this for such a long time that I know how to get over things quickly good or bad,” he said in the early hours of Friday morning. “I’ve always had that same process, go to the net hit the same amount of balls, same ball, and figure it out there.”

The Eagles beat the Commanders on Thursday night in a score that shouldn’t have looked as close as 26-18 did because Elliott couldn’t add seven points to that total. He missed field goals of 44 and 51 yards and his missed PAT after the Eagles scored their first touchdown early in the fourth quarter loomed large because it made the score just 12-10, not 13-10. If he had made all three of those kicks, the final score would have been 33-16.

“On the sideline I just have to do exactly what I’ve been doing, double down on my process, keep hitting the ball the way I know how to hit, go back to my pregame trust that I have a good plan and just keep attacking it and keep swinging,” he said.

Head coach Nick Sirianni did what he could in-game to keep Elliott from beginning the crawl inside his head.

“Just like I would say to somebody that fumbled or dropped a pass in a moment, ‘We believe in you, you're going to have to make a kick to help us win this football game,’” Sirianni explained to him. “We have so much faith in him and that's what you do.”

The coach wasn’t the only one who had Elliott’s back in the aftermath of the wreckage. So did his teammates, he said.

“I don’t need a lot of positivity around me, (but) I also don’t need anyone to tell me that I suck and that I need to fix it right now,” he said. “I kind of take that on myself. I’m my hardest critic.”

The faith remains, even though Elliott is going through the worst season of his career, which began when the Eagles signed him off the practice squad of the Bengals in 2017 to replace a then-injured Caleb Sturgis.

Since then, he has converted 85.7 percent of his field goals with 12 missed PATs in 122 games. Last year, he missed just two field goals and only one PAT. He was an incredible 7-for-8 from 50-plus yards.

In the difference-a-year-can-make department, he is just 14-for-19 on his field goals and 0-for-4 from 50-plus this season.

“I have to go take a deep dive and figure out exactly what was happening,” he said. “I’ll take the weekend, take a deep dive into it and fix it as fast as possible. I’m confident in the kicker I am and I’m confident in the way I’ve been hitting the ball this year and I just have to double down on the process.”