Rex Ryan went on morning television Monday and did not bother with a runway: the Philadelphia Eagles run game is "atrocious." That was the verdict on a team that just won a football game. When a former head coach spends his airtime tearing into the ground attack of a winner, that is worth sitting with for a minute.

The panel on "Get Up" ran through the Eagles' Week 2 win over Tennessee, the state of the Pittsburgh Steelers offense, and the Deshaun Watson situation in Cleveland. The Eagles segment is the one that traveled, because of who the Eagles are supposed to be.

What Rex Ryan said about the Philadelphia Eagles run game

The framing matters. This was not a postmortem on a loss, where every criticism gets a free pass because the scoreboard agrees with you. Philadelphia won. Ryan went after the run game anyway, and "atrocious" is not a word you reach for when you mean "a little inconsistent." That is a man saying the thing he thinks other people are being polite about.

I have watched enough of these Monday morning segments to know the difference between manufactured heat and a real irritation. This read like the second one. You do not have to agree with the volume to notice that nobody at the table jumped in to defend the ground game.

Why the criticism cuts deeper in Philadelphia

Because running the football is the identity. This is the franchise that handed Saquon Barkley the ball until defenses fell over, watched him run for 2,005 yards in 2024, and then ran the Chiefs off the field in Super Bowl LIX. The tush push became a national argument specifically because Philadelphia was so good at the least glamorous thing in the sport. Short yardage was not a weakness to scheme around. It was the weapon.

checked the almanac: 2,005 yards in a regular season and then a title. that is not a scheme, that is a personality.

So when the run game stalls out, it is not a unit problem, it is an identity problem. Everything else Philadelphia does on offense is downstream of making defenses respect the handoff. Play action, the boots, the shots down the field when a safety creeps up a half step. Take away the threat and Jalen Hurts is asked to win a different kind of game than the one this roster was built to play.

That is the real story here, and it is why a former coach was willing to spend a segment yelling about it after a win. Wins paper over a lot. They do not paper over the thing you are supposed to be best at.

Pittsburgh and Cleveland on the same docket

The same panel moved on to the Steelers offense and to Deshaun Watson and the Browns, which tells you roughly everything about how the AFC North is being discussed right now. Pittsburgh's offense has been the subject of this exact conversation, in this exact format, for a while. Cleveland's quarterback situation has been the league's longest running argument, and it has not found an ending yet.

I do not have the full detail of either segment in front of me, so I will not pretend to. What I can tell you is that three franchises with real history and real expectations all showed up on the same morning show for the same reason: what they are doing on offense does not yet look like what they think they are.

What comes next for the Eagles

Watch the carries. Not the yards, the carries. If Philadelphia comes out next time and commits to the run through a bad first quarter, that tells you the staff believes the problem is variance and blocking reps. If they abandon it early and put it all on Hurts' arm, that is the coaching staff agreeing with Rex Ryan without saying so out loud. That is a tell.

And for a team whose whole thing is imposing itself, that would be the loudest quiet admission of the young season.