Philadelphia Eagles 2026: The Coverage Report — 118 graded cutdown calls, 92.4% right, and almost no skill in it

One of 32 post-cutdown coverage reports, one per club. Everything below measures the outlets MissedTakes tracks and grades — not all of football media. If a show or a beat writer isn't in our database, their Eagles work isn't in these numbers.

Coverage: heavy, and near the top of the league

Group every graded take on the site by team and Philadelphia sits fourth: 376 graded takes, behind Buffalo (527), Kansas City (403) and the Rams (380), and just ahead of New England (353). In raw volume — graded and pending together — the Eagles rank third with 894 takes, behind the Bills' 1,050 and the Rams' 936.

The league average across the 32 clubs is 248 graded takes; the median is 222.5. Philadelphia draws roughly 1.5 times the average club's graded attention. This is not a thin-coverage team, and there is no gap to explain away.

The results the club has produced justify the attention: 11-6 and a playoff berth in 2025, a Super Bowl title in 2024 at 14-3, and playoff appearances in every season since 2021.

What's interesting is the shape of that coverage rather than the size of it. Eagles takes grade out at 70.1% average accuracy — sixth-best of the 32 clubs — but only +7.74 average skill delta, meaning pundits collectively did barely better than a naive baseline would have. Compare Seattle (74.9% accuracy, +56.45 skill) or New England (71.0%, +45.32). High marks on Philadelphia have been cheap marks.

The cutdown: 109 right, 9 wrong, and every miss the same shape

Roster-spot calls are the biggest single block of Eagles punditry we hold: 230 takes, 118 of them graded as of today, with 112 still pending. Average accuracy on the graded set is 92.4%. Because these grade as all-or-nothing, that's exactly 109 correct calls and nine misses.

All nine misses point the same direction. Every one was a pundit predicting a player *off* the 53 — waived, or stashed on the practice squad — who instead made the roster. Not a single graded call went the other way: nobody who was projected as a lock got cut, at least not among the takes graded so far.

The players who beat their write-ups:

• Marquise Brown, twice, both by Jeff Kerr. On August 6 Kerr labeled "Hollywood Brown won't make the Eagles roster" an overreaction — but on August 20 he wrote that "a good Day 2 of practice could push Brown off the roster bubble", graded as a cut call. 0 accuracy, −200 skill.
• Elijah Moore, twice, from two sources. Kerr on August 11: "Moore is making it difficult for the Eagles to cut him" — graded as a cut. Raju Byfield a day earlier: "Elijah Moore is in danger of being waived by the Philadelphia Eagles at final cutdown unless he makes waves in preseason." Both 0 accuracy, −200 skill.
• Quez Watkins. Kerr, August 15: "Watkins isn't going to make the Eagles, but there's a spot for him on the practice squad."
• Rocco Underwood. In his third 53-man projection Kerr wrote that the Eagles would "expose Underwood to waivers and look for a long snapper in free agency." They didn't.
• Cole Payton. Josh Edwards, August 25: "Philadelphia's plan at quarterback may be as simple as trying to slip fifth-round pick Cole Payton onto the practice squad." The fifth-rounder made the 53.

One caveat worth printing: two of the nine misses — Makai Lemon and Markel Bell, from Kerr's cut-risk ranking of the 2025 draft class — are graded as "he does not make the 53" even though the quoted evidence reads "Neither are getting waived by this football team by Sunday." Both scored 0 accuracy but 0 skill, so they don't move the totals much. Read them as an extraction quirk rather than a bad call.

Where the calls actually earned something

Most correct Eagles roster calls scored zero skill: the baseline for a player who was on somebody's 53 last season is that he makes one again, so naming Jalen Hurts, Saquon Barkley, DeVonta Smith or Zack Baun to the roster grades at 100% accuracy and +0 skill. The calls that beat the baseline were about players the baseline expected to be cut:

• Willie Lampkin, three separate +200 calls by Kerr, from "Lampkin has trending towards making the roster with how he's played this summer" on August 16 to "Lampkin has earned a roster spot" on August 24.
• Eli Stowers, called by Kerr in two projections and by Nathan Jahnke on August 24 — "Stowers should still make the roster given his draft capital". +200 each.
• Makai Lemon, Markel Bell and Micah Morris, all +200 when named as locks or projected roster members.

That is the honest summary of Eagles cutdown coverage: a very high hit rate built mostly on restating the obvious, with the real value concentrated in five first-year names.

The rest of the record

Sorted by graded volume, here is what else the Eagles file contains.

Two patterns. The team-level calls that amount to "the Eagles are good" all cash — division winners 22-for-22, playoff picks at 94.4% — and produce no skill, because a naive baseline says the same thing. The calls that require actually distinguishing this team from the other contenders fall apart: conference champions 26.9%, Super Bowl picks 30.0%, award picks 12.5%. Individual-player projections are worse still — positional finishes grade at 17.9% accuracy and −60.08 skill on 13 graded takes, the worst mark in the file, though 13 is a thin sample and should be read that way. Depth-chart calls (162 takes) are almost entirely ungraded: five grades so far.

Who has an Eagles record

Only one pundit has volume here. Kerr accounts for 113 of the club's 376 graded takes — 30% of everything graded on this team — and every one of his 113 graded takes site-wide is a roster-spot call. He is also the only pundit with enough roster-spot volume to appear on the type leaderboard, where his published record is 74.31 accuracy and a MissedTakes Score of −28.17. On the team view, which averages each Eagles take equally, his calls come out at 93.8% accuracy and +10.62 skill. The two views weight difficulty differently (methodology); the level moves, the shape doesn't. He is right constantly and paid little for it, because the naive baseline is right constantly too.

Below him the samples get thin fast: Colin Cowherd (21 graded, 69.4%), Rich Eisen (17, 52.9%), Chris Brockman (17, 51.5%), Nick Wright (12, 77.0%), Gregg Rosenthal (10, 79.8%), Kyle Crabbs (10, 37.5%). None of those are large enough to rank anyone on, and we won't.

By outlet, Sports Illustrated leads with 114 graded Eagles takes at 93.9% accuracy — essentially Kerr's cutdown file — followed by The Herd with Colin Cowherd at 67 graded and 72.2%.

The Eagles get covered like a contender. The graded record says that coverage is accurate, well-sourced on the roster margins, and almost entirely unwilling to say anything the default answer wouldn't already say.