Pederson “Disappointed” by Agholor’s Postgame Tirade

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 By Patrick Del Gaone, Sports Talk Philly staff writer 

At Monday's presser, Philadelphia Eagles' head coach Doug Pederson expressed his dismay pertaining to wideout Nelson Agholor's profanity-laced postgame interview last night.

The former first-round pick made headlines following Sunday night’s gut-wrenching 29-23 overtime loss to the Dallas Cowboys by dismissing questions about his critical redzone drop early in the game.

“That sh*t is nothing,” Agholor said. “I don’t look at no drops, none of that type of sh*t. I’m tired of hearing that, that sh*t is stupid. We play football. I dropped the first one, I ain’t drop one after that. What does that matter? I get it, certain plays could’ve helped, but there’s still four quarters of football to be played. We gotta win, you heard it from me, I don’t got time for that no more. I got time to win football games only. No statistics, no ‘who did this’… win. That’s all that matters.”

Agholor’s miscue cost the Eagles a first-and-goal, and resulted in the only incompletion of an otherwise flawless opening series from quarterback Carson Wentz.

This afternoon, Pederson was forthright in regard to the former USC Trojan’s controversial comments.

“I’m disappointed in the type of comments [Agholor made],” Pederson said. “I think each individual has to be responsible for their own job, obviously. And we’ve gotta make smart choices. Everybody’s mad and angry after tough losses, like we just came through, and cooler head prevail. We just have to bite our lip sometimes, and just suck it up, and get to work. That’s what we’ve gotta do this week.”

Had Agholor been accountable for his blunder during the postgame interview, the primary topic of conversation today would’ve been Pederson’s decision to call a swing pass to Darren Sproles on third down, a play that lost six yards and took Philly out of field goal range while leading by seven points in the fourth quarter.

“The third-and-eight play, I would’ve called the same thing again,” Pederson said. “It’s assignment football. It’s one of our basic fundamental plays that we’ve repped the entire season in a man situation, which we got. We busted one assignment, and [a] negative play happened. We have to own up to [it], it starts with me, and then each man on the team has to own up to their responsibility and make sure those negative plays don’t happen again.”

“You guys know football, I mean come on. Any play has the ability to go backwards. I know where we we were on the field. It is a relatively safe football play, it gets Darren Sproles out in space, in a man coverage look, that we have the ability to run some interference on some linebackers. We didn’t run the interference like we were supposed to. [If] we make that play, we are inside the 20-yard line.”

While the first-year head coach doesn’t anticipate the team trading for an offensive weapon before tomorrow’s deadline, as has been rumored, his final remark of the afternoon about the defensive approach teams have taken against Philadelphia could be interpreted as an informal request to acquire a playmaker.

“I think there might be a little bit to that,” Pederson said. “Are they gonna focus on Darren? Yeah, they’re gonna focus on Darren a little bit. Might focus on our tight ends a little bit in coverage. But what we’ve seen the last couple of weeks is, they’re just playing their defense. Teams that are executing their defense and not necessarily taking one aspect away from our offense.”

You can watch the full press conference from Pederson below.

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