No matter how much Nick Sirianni tries to downplay it, the Philadelphia Eagles know they are telegraphing their offensive tendencies.

If the Eagles are in a pistol or under-center set, they almost always run. If they're in the shotgun, they sparingly run. The percentages are glaring when compared to other NFL teams. And opponents are aware. Already, Jalen Hurts and Saquon Barkley have felt the effects of a slow-to-start system that has been too predictable within first-time offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo's first two games.

"It's definitely on our mind as far as when you plan those things," said Patullo, who reviewed his team's tendencies Tuesday morning. "You always want to make sure, like, 'Oh, I have a tendency I can break.' Definitely need to do that this week."

Here's a snapshot of a moment that inhibited the Eagles. Their defense opened the second half of Sunday's win over the Kansas City Chiefs with a fourth-down stop. Barkley lined up behind Hurts for a pistol snap at the Chiefs' 35 -- prime field position to strong-arm the opponent. But Chiefs linebacker Drue Tranquill, leaning before the snap, fought off right guard Tyler Steen and helped bury Barkley for a one-yard gain. That led to a predictable passing down (third-and-8) in which Hurts chucked an incomplete deep ball while getting crushed by a seven-man rush.

Here's another. On the Eagles' next possession, leading 13-10, Barkley lined up behind Hurts in another first-and-10 pistol set at their own 35. That time, it was Chiefs linebacker Leo Chenal who was already leaning before the snap. Chenal charged ahead of left guard Landon Dickerson and forced Barkley to cut to the backside for a three-yard gain. An immediate false start penalty produced a second-and-12 shotgun snap in which the Chiefs backed off in max coverage. Hurts failed to find a receiver, tried to improvise and was decleated by defensive tackle Omarr Norman-Lott. The Eagles punted to a Chiefs offense that lost its grip on the game by subsequently turning the ball over on the goal line.

Both moments are among the many Patullo must ensure are squashed before the undefeated Los Angeles Rams arrive at Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday. Patullo insisted he has tendency breakers in his playbook. In general, he said, "You may go into a game and say, like, 'Hey, this is the play we've got to break the tendency with,' but then it never occurs because it's not that kind of game for it." He did not specify how there could be a full game that prohibits variance.

Sirianni has not seemed alarmed about the issue. A reporter first presented the patterns to the fifth-year coach after the Eagles' Week 1 win over the Dallas Cowboys. Sirianni dismissed the question, saying the stats were too broad in scope. After the tendencies remained unchanged against the Chiefs, Sirianni was just as dismissive, saying people had to look at the stats in smaller categories -- like downs.

"You can't look at that number as a whole for it to tell the entire story," Sirianni said Monday.

And by personnel... (which accounts for the Brotherly Shove)

Sirianni's refusal to acknowledge the obvious puts his management of Patullo under scrutiny. Sirianni erred in becoming far too involved in the 2023 system that stagnated under former offensive coordinator Brian Johnson, but nudging Patullo to be less predictable is hardly micromanagement. Sirianni can very well handle such accountability privately. He's done so in other instances. But Sirianni's public excuses don't inspire confidence in a Patullo-led offense that totaled 216 yards against the Chiefs -- the fourth fewest by any Eagles team that still managed to win since 2000, per TruMedia. (None of the other teams made the playoffs.)

"We're constantly looking at our self-scout," Sirianni said on Monday. "We're constantly making sure that we're not giving anything away to the defense. But there are times you're going to have tendencies. You do your best to put a seed of doubt in the defense's mind to break tendencies. But a lot of teams -- good teams have tendencies. But that doesn't mean you don't fight like crazy to fight them and to, again, put seeds of doubt in the defense's mind of what you're doing."

If the Eagles are planting seeds of doubt, they haven't reaped any harvest yet. Patullo's play designs have instead mostly yielded plagues of certainty. The risk of predictability may be obvious, but here are more numbers that offer proof.

According to TruMedia, there is a great disparity in the rates at which the Eagles are seeing defenses crowd the box with eight or more defenders within the sets they run. Their rate of seeing 8-plus boxes in under-center snaps is 32.7 percentage points higher than all other NFL teams, which Sirianni argues is due to the blatancy of the Brotherly Shove.

OK, remove the Brotherly Shove. The rate is still 75 percent, 24.9 percentage points higher than other teams. The Eagles also aren't running the Brotherly Shove out of the pistol (18.6 percentage points higher). The Brotherly Shove can't also be blamed for why their opponents back off in coverage when Hurts lines up in the shotgun (a 3.1 percentage-point difference in 8-plus boxes).

It's foreboding that there isn't yet a large enough sample size to evaluate how the Eagles pass against 8-plus boxes. Hurts has two pass attempts in such situations. (And they totaled seven yards.) The league average is 7.7 pass attempts. Eleven teams have thrown the ball at least 10 times against 8-plus boxes. The options other teams are choosing are available to the Eagles: deep shots, quick passes, screens, play-actions, et al.

The Eagles' 10 play-action pass attempts are tied for the fifth fewest in the NFL, a striking figure considering they have both the league's reigning Offensive Player of the Year (Barkley) and one of the league's top dual-threat quarterbacks. And when the Eagles did try to take a play-action shot to A.J. Brown on the first play of Sunday's game, they failed to block it appropriately. Tight ends Grant Calcaterra and Kyle Granson both whiffed on blitzing cornerback Jaylen Watson. Hurts, nearly sacked, escaped Watson but lost his one-handed grip on the football for a fumble that Calcaterra recovered. Brown was holding his hand up in the open field. The Eagles eventually punted on the drive.

Sirianni, at the very least, conceded the Eagles lack explosive plays. He has defined them as runs of 10-plus yards and passes of 16-plus yards. The Eagles have totaled 10 such plays through two games, second fewest in that span, only to the 2023 season (9) within the Sirianni era. Eight of those explosives are run plays.

Entering this season, Hurts had averaged nine explosive completions within the first two games since becoming a full-time starter in 2021. One of his two this season, a 28-yard throw to Smith, sealed the win on Sunday. Hurts launched the pass before getting crushed by an all-out blitz. The difference-making play underlines both the importance of explosive plays and why the Eagles are narrowly beating opponents due to the heavy lifting of their defense.

Whether it's Patullo's play designs, their predictability, or both, Hurts isn't pushing the ball downfield. His average depth of target through two games (6.0) is the lowest of his career. Even within the conservative approach of last year's system, Hurts had an ADOT of 7.9, according to TruMedia. Hurts' ADOT when throwing to his most lethal target, Brown, is substantially lower this year (7.4) than their average ADOT in their three previous seasons together (12.0).

On Sunday, Sirianni called Hurts "one of the best deep-ball throwers in the NFL." Hurts is tied with Michael Penix Jr. for attempting the second-fewest throws of 16-plus air yards (5), according to TruMedia. That two-week total is also the lowest of Hurts' career as a full-time starter. It's possible that Kansas City's man-heavy coverage, doubling of Brown and blitz-heavy approach diminished downfield opportunities, but Patullo offered no specifics when he was asked why there were so few of them.

"We kind of got the ball where it needed to be in time and space with what was happening," Patullo said. "If you're expecting like these deep-developing routes, that probably wasn't going to happen on that day the way it was played out."

Perhaps more troubling, the Eagles' midrange passing game has also been absent. Hurts is the only starting quarterback to have yet thrown a pass between 10-20 air yards, per TruMedia. Patullo partly attributed Sunday's lack of midrange passes to getting the ball out quickly under pressure (Hurts averaged 2.74 seconds to throw; he averaged 3.06 in 2024). But 32 other NFL quarterbacks have completed 136 of 249 pass attempts on throws of 10-20 air yards within 2.74 seconds or less.

Here's another eyebrow-raiser: None of Hurts' 23 rushes so far this season were designed quarterback runs. Eight were Brotherly Shove sneaks. Fifteen were scrambles. Since Sirianni was named head coach in 2021, explosive pass plays have, in part, been opened up by an effective run game that features Hurts as a dual-threat option. Adding Barkley in 2024 skyrocketed the system's potency.

Hurts and Barkley often spoke about how they opened up the game for one another. Patullo has curiously pocketed such plays, and the Eagles are averaging fewer rushing yards per game (140.0) and yards per carry (3.9) than they ever have through two games in the Sirianni era.

Asked Sunday about that lack, and whether he'd like to see more designed runs (zone-read or otherwise), Hurts said, "That's a conversation for Coach Patullo."

"Ultimately, (we) find ways to win and continue to find out what is our identity as an offense," Hurts added. "And those things change as things go on and time goes on. But it's a matter of being able to put yourself in positions to find a way to win."

Patullo said Tuesday that he doesn't think moments to run such designed runs have "come up, really, necessarily, right now," and that Hurts "does a good job of running when he needs to."

"And don't worry," he added. "We still have those."

Pressed further, Patullo did not specify why moments haven't "come up" for such runs.

"Well, sometimes it just depends on really what they're doing," Patullo said. "And the other day, kind of what they were doing, we didn't really need them necessarily. So there were certain times where we could have done it, but we felt like we had other stuff."

Plainly speaking, the other stuff hasn't really worked.

Patullo must make certain his system (and its production) is no longer predictable.

Eagles offense has a problem. OC Kevin Patullo says he'll fix it