In their loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Week 4, the Philadelphia Eagles forgot how to tackle, as short Buccaneers gains turned into long ones and attacks that might otherwise have faltered instead resulted in points.

According to NFL Next Gen Stats, the Eagles recorded 16 missed tackles. Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said Tuesday that the Eagles counted 15. I took a look myself and found 13. Here are those 13 missed tackles in thread form via Twitter:

I had Nakobe Dean down for four missed tackles; Reed Blankenship accounted for three.

The Eagles also missed a lot of tackles against the Packers in Week 1, so that wasn’t exactly a new problem, although they did make good tackles against the Saints in Week 3 in New Orleans.

“We often left our feet too early,” Fangio said. “Sometimes we didn’t do it well enough.”

The Eagles do not practice, either in training camp or during the regular season. Most teams don’t do that. However, the Eagles are on the far more cautious end of the spectrum when it comes to playing starters in preseason games, where players could benefit from some tackling reps.

“You emphasize it through film study, through drills and better technique,” ​​Fangio said when asked how tackling can improve when there is no tackling in practice.

The Eagles will have a little more time this week to fix some of their fundamental tackling issues on the bye.

“This will be the week where we review some of our practices,” Nick Sirianni said. “You try to do as many exercises as possible to simulate as many duels as possible. It is difficult for the entire league to truly simulate duels. Because you don’t do the thing live.” Well, the same goes for ball security. You’re more prone to distorting the football when you’re really under attack. So it’s a long season and I think what you have to do is put your guys in positions to simulate it and at the same time protect your guys to make sure you have your guys every Sunday.

“I think what I’m definitely going to do this week is: OK, let’s look at, we know that the issue – what are the common themes of the tackles that we’re missing? And I have a pretty good idea of ​​what they are.” . How do we simulate this in exercises? How do we show it in meetings, from around the league, so emphasize it. And that will be the process we go through this week.

“But with the amount of tackles we missed in that last game, that led to them gaining a lot more yards. And you’re going to miss a few tackles every game, but that wasn’t up to our standard. And there were different circumstances why we need to be corrected. And every time I talk about it, I get so excited about the details and fundamentals that it hurts me when we don’t approach it well. “

Follow Jimmy & PhillyVoice on Twitter: @JimmyKempski | thePhillyVoice

Like us on Facebook: PhillyVoice Sports

Add Jimmy’s RSS feed to your feed reader