What They Should Be Thinking Today: Philadelphia Eagles

In an attempt to get inside the heads of NFC East teams, we occasionally take a step back by looking at what each squad should be thinking at any given point. In light of Sunday's, um, interesting performance against the Cleveland Browns, here is what should be going through the Philadelphia Eagles' heads.

Our quarterback is taking too many hits

We know, it's a broken record at this point, but PhillyMag.com reports that Michael Vick was hit 14 times on Sunday, which would put him on an unacceptable pace. Considering that the Browns have a mediocre pass rush, we're extremely concerned about what the Baltimore Ravens might do to Vick next Sunday.

It would be easy to pin all of these problems on Vick, but it goes so far beyond that. The entire offensive line struggled Sunday against a team that had just 32 sacks last season. 

What can we do at this point? Well, we can start by insisting that Vick throws more balls away. We can win without him playing Superman every week and we can't control the productivity of the line at this stage. Vick is our employee. We can't ask him to play more safely and take proper slides, but we can tell him to do those things. 

At this point, that might be our only choice.

We have to establish more balance offensively

Our head coach admitted following the game that we probably should have run more early against Cleveland, but he's said that to the media time and again in the past. Frankly, with the line struggling—especially without Jason Peters—we have no excuse for giving LeSean McCoy only six first-half carries.

Ultimately, we ran 60 pass plays and 23 running plays on Sunday, which worked in Cleveland's favor by giving their offense more opportunities than they deserved. 

This team is good enough to win with Vick acting as more of a game manager than a star. We're going to draw up more scripted runs early next week against Baltimore, because we won't stand a chance if we lack balance like that again.

This was a wake-up call

We have to be desperate from the outset. There's a good chance that Andy Reid will lose his job and this team will get re-worked if we don't experience playoff success this year. Almost losing to the Browns in our opener could work in our favor because we're still tied in first place, and yet we're embarrassed.

Suffering a scare against a bad team like Cleveland should force us to bear down and focus on what's required to keep winning in safer fashion. 

On the bright side, we can walk away from Week 1 thrilled with our defense. The coverage was good, the pressure was top-notch and the tackling was crisp. But let's keep in mind that we were facing a quarterback-running back duo making their career debuts. We should still view this as a loss, despite the final score.