Eagles OC Brian Johnson gets booed but leans on D’Andre Swift and learns to run the damn ball

It was late in the first quarter of the second game of the season. Jalen Hurts looked terrible again. So did first-time offensive coordinator Brian Johnson. Everyone at Lincoln Financial Field knew why.

Johnson wouldn’t run the damn ball. He wouldn’t use his running backs, and 67,000 tired, angry people watching their team trailing a lousy Vikings team that kept giving the football away began to boo the OC.

Who boos the OC? Birds fans, that’s who.

They booed him for calling passing plays, especially after Hurts threw his worst interception since 2021, in the first quarter. They booed him for calling running plays designed for Hurts. They booed him for ignoring the obvious, same as he’d done in the opener Sunday in New England, when his backs got just 16 runs against a poor Patriots squad.

The thing the Eagles do best — and they do a lot of things well — is run block. Period. Center Jason Kelce and right tackle Lane Johnson are the best players on a team full of stars, and they love to run block.

Brian Johnson’s been with this team for three years. He should know this. He had three accomplished running backs at his disposal Thursday night, even if his favorite, Kenneth Gainwell, was out with an injury.

D’Andre Swift finished with a career-high 175 yards and a touchdown on 28 carries. Fittingly, Swift’s 43-yarder that put the game away in the fourth quarter, setting up his 2-yard TD, put him over the top — the top being, of course, his 144-yard effort in last year’s opener for the Lions against these Eagles. Boston Scott had 40 yards on five carries before he left with a possible concussion. Rashaad Penny got three carries and 9 yards.

That’s 36 totes, more than twice as many as Sunday.

The backs and the blockers were the reason the Eagles won, 34-28. The reason they moved to 2-0. The reason they’ve struck fear into the hearts of the NFC once again.

It was just a little crazy that Johnson had to learn the hard way. He had historical evidence. He’d lived the precedent.

The first seven games of 2021, when Nick Sirianni and Johnson landed in Philly as head coach and quarterbacks coach, they tried to throw too much, and they stunk. Then Sirianni gave up play-calling to offensive coordinator Shane Steichen and they committed to the run. They’ve gone 24-8, with two trips to the playoffs and one trip to the Super Bowl, since Sirianni was silenced, and Steichen’s now the head coach of the Colts.

Kelce and Johnson put Steichen in Indianapolis. They got him the job more than anyone, including Steichen himself.

Steichen figured out they were his best players, and they are complemented by three studs. Johnson has figured it out, too.

It’s not rocket surgery.

It’s not brain science.

Run the damn ball.

On the first possession of the second quarter, he did. Trailing, 7-3, starting at the 25, Brian Johnson called 12 of the next 16 plays for running backs. There was a short pass to a back, and a scramble, and an incompletion, and a QB sneak at the end, but they turned the game, and likely the season, on the backs of the backs and the blockers.

D’Andre Swift, for 7, then 3. Then, cheers. Cheers for Brian Johnson.

The cheers were, at first, derisive, like when a pitcher who walked three in a row throws a strike. Slowly, the cheers became sincere. Philly fans are forgiving of their own when their own owns his failings.

So, then, Swift for 6. Then 4, then 2. Then Boston Scott for 5, the misfire, then 11 yards to A.J. Brown, then back to work: Swift for 7, then 5, then 4, then Hurts’ QB sneak and a 10-7 lead.

It was 13-7 at the half because, after the Vikings’ third fumble, at their own 25 and with just 33 seconds to play, Scott ran for 7 off left guard, and 18 off right end, and set up a 61-yard field goal by Jake Elliott.

It became 20-7 after the Vikings’ fourth fumble, in the third quarter, because Swift crushed it up the middle for 6 yards and framed another Hurts sneak.

It turned into a laugher later in the third because Swift’s 5-yard run turned second-and-9 into third-and-4, which kept the Vikings honest, which freed DeVonta Smith for a 63-yard bomb and a 27-7 lead.

You could see Johnson learning in real time, like when the velociraptors figured out the door handles in Jurassic Park. He won’t be allowed to speak for himself until his scheduled press conference next week, since Eagles coordinators don’t talk after games.

Johnson saw his tackles sealing the edges. He saw his guards mauling defensive tackles. He watched Kelce lope forward, like the vanguard of a cavalry, leaving bread crumbs for the backs to follow.

Johnson abandoned logic early in the fourth quarter, when, at the Vikings’ 25, he called four consecutive pass plays that resulted in 24 lost yards and cost them a chance at a field goal that would have made it 30-14. A touchdown would have created a 20-point lead. Instead, the Vikings drove and scored and made it 27-21.

Maybe Johnson called passing plays because receiver A.J. Brown looked like he was yelling at Hurts between the third and fourth quarters. Maybe Johnson hadn’t quite learned his lesson.

He quickly rectified matters. On the clinching drive, Johnson called Swift’s number seven times for 63 yards, passing just once to convert a third-and-5.

Nobody booed.