Why Jake Elliott and the Eagles believe ‘the sky is not falling’ despite the kicker’s recent struggles

Michael Clay accurately predicted the future Tuesday, when the Eagles special teams coordinator said Jake Elliott was going to shoulder the blame for the 52-yard field goal he missed early in the third quarter of the team’s win over Carolina on Sunday. Clay thought the entire operation — from snap to hold to kick — could have been cleaner.

But Elliott, when presented with Clay’s comments Thursday, said the missed kick was his responsibility more than anyone else’s.

“It’s on me. I missed the kick,” Elliott said of the attempt that kept him without a make beyond 50 yards in five tries this season.

Elliott wasn’t likely to pass the blame to anyone else anyway. But long snapper Rick Lovato added some context to the overall process from start to finish. The snap, Lovato said, was a little inside and high. The laces were inside a bit too much, so holder Braden Mann had to do more than just catch the ball and put it down.

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“It could’ve been a lot cleaner to help Jake out,” Lovato said.

Then, of course, there was the gust of wind that everyone who’s been asked about the topic since Sunday has mentioned, the element of the kicking game that is entirely out of the control of every person involved.

This week at the NovaCare Complex has not been about reinventing the wheel. Elliott does film reviews to try to assess what’s going wrong when he’s missing kicks. He has missed six field goals this season, the most during his eight-year NFL career. The deep film dive, Elliott says, has yielded no glaring issues in mechanics.

“Quite honestly I’ve been hitting the ball pretty good for the most part,” he said. “I feel confident in where I’m at. Obviously a couple of the long ones haven’t gone through, and I would like them all to go through, but sometimes that’s not the nature of the game.

“I keep my routine my routine. I’m not going to go overexaggerate and hit a million balls and wreck my body doing something like that. I kind of double down on my process. I’ve been doing it for a long time and I trust it.”

Lovato said Elliott has been the same kicker he’s always been in recent weeks of practice.

“We’ve always had the most trust in Jake because he’s Jake Elliott,” Lovato said. “We love everything about him and his confidence and the way he approaches every single week no matter if he made 100 kicks or missed 100 kicks. It doesn’t matter. Jake’s always been that guy that you can rely on no matter what.”

The Eagles are trusting the kicker who last season set a franchise record for field goal percentage (93.8%), too. They have not yet brought in another body despite Elliott’s four missed field goals and a missed point-after attempt over the last six games.

“Last year he was nails, but obviously it’s this year,” Clay said. “It is what it is. It’s the reality of the sport. The sky is not falling down in our eyes.”

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Elliott’s struggles, however, presented the Eagles with an interesting decision Sunday. They could have sent Elliott on the field to attempt a 54-yard field goal to push their 22-16 lead to two scores and ice the game. Instead, deep in its own endthey punted and Mann pinned Carolina at the 3-yard line. In addition to the missed 52-yarder, which was very wide right, Elliott also hooked an extra point that was negated by an offside penalty. Clay said that kick wasn’t worrisome because Elliott likely had the offside player in his line of sight and knew a penalty was coming.

Surely, the Eagles will need Elliott at some point to hit a clutch kick. Their nine-game winning streak has featured a few multi-score victories that have masked some of Elliott’s issues.

And while the Eagles probably celebrated the fact that their plane travel was done for the regular season after they landed in Philadelphia following their Week 12 victory in Los Angeles, that just meant the kicking operation was going to deal with the weather in the northeast. The Eagles are able to simulate some of those conditions in practice outside. On a cold and windy day Thursday, Elliott missed a short kick during the early moments of Eagles practice before appearing to connect from a similar distance moments later.

“That pressure, it builds, but at the same time we’ve done this for a very long time together,” Lovato said. “It’s something I know we’ll get fixed.”

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For his part, Elliott says he’s not thinking about it. He’s not big on stats, he said, although he has pointed out the numbers from 50-plus need more context. One of the attempts was from 60 yards. Two of them were from 57, and one of those two was blocked by Cleveland’s Myles Garrett.

“I feel pretty good about how I’m able to refocus after one kick,” Elliott said. “Every kick is a new kick. Every kick is a different kick, so you move on to the next one every time.”

The Eagles are pretty healthy heading into Sunday’s home game vs. Pittsburgh. Just one player on the active roster, safety Sydney Brown (knee), was limited during practice. Brown did not practice Wednesday.

The rest of the team participated fully, including safety Reed Blankenship (concussion), defensive lineman Jalen Carter (shoulder), and wide receiver Britain Covey (neck), all of whom were listed as limited on Wednesday.

The Eagles play in Week 15 against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Join Eagles beat reporters Olivia Reiner and EJ Smith as they dissect the hottest storylines surrounding the team on Gameday Central, live from Lincoln Financial Field.