By Patrick Del Gaone, Sports Talk Philly staff writer 
Had Allen Iverson pursued his decorated football career past high school, Jim Schwartz might’ve been the perfect coach for the dynamic speedster.
The Eagles defensive coordinator invoked one of Iverson's most infamous beliefs this morning at the NovaCare Complex when asked to evaluate Mychal Kendricks' performance in practice.
“Practice doesn’t mean anything,” Schwartz said. “I don’t want to get Allen Iverson in there. I mean, it’s all about how you perform on Sunday.”
After tremendous success to open the season, allowing only 20 offensive points in the three games prior to last Sunday’s loss in the Motor City, Schwartz’s defense displayed a segment of vulnerability against the Lions for the first time this season.
The tightly-contested affair was a tale of two halves. First, versatile running back Theo Riddick gashed the Eagles for two of Detroit’s three first half touchdowns. Then, after ironing out issues at halftime, the Philadelphia defenders settled down and stifled the Lions, nearly shutting out Jim Bob Cooter’s offense in the second half before Ryan Mathews’ fumble set up a short field for Detroit’s game-winning field goal.
“I thought our leverage was bad on a couple screens, but I don’t necessarily think our tackling wasn’t good,” Schwartz said. “We’re gonna miss some tackles. It’s because were an aggressive defense that we like to fly and not slow down at the ball. In order to do that, you need other guys filling off of you. If you over-coach guys not to miss tackles, you don’t fly to the ball. You don’t have big hits and things like that, and it sort of softens you up. If you take an approach of guys run with their angle, and aggressively take their angle, they’re gonna miss sometimes… That’s why team pursuit is so important, and team speed is so important.”
According to Schwartz, the defensive showing wasn’t stable enough to win, even though the Lions accrued just 244 yards on the afternoon. With that said, he does believe the rigorous 60-minute bout at Ford Field had a silver lining.
“We played our worst half of football over the course of the season,” Schwartz said. “But I was proud of the way they responded in the second half. Four sacks, a turnover… A loss is a loss, hopefully we can use some of the lessons we learned from that to help us win some games in the future. One of the things that may serve us well from that is the fact that we hadn’t been in a close game before. Our first three games, there was a lot of grinning in the fourth quarter on the sideline, because the games were sorta out of hand. You’re gonna have to play tight games in the NFL, and there’s some seasoning there’s some experience that goes along with that.”
The Eagles will travel to Washington this weekend for their first divisional game of the year. Among the key matchups to watch is the Redskins robust offensive line against Philly’s menacing front four.
“They’ve got some big guys up front,” Schwartz said. “It starts with [Trent Williams], he’s a Pro Bowl player. If you talk about the offensive line play, you can probably start there because teams have ability to rely on one guy that they think can take a rusher out, then they can take their scheme in other places. I like our pass rush, I think that’s a great matchup in this game. Our ability to generate pass rush, our ability to blitz, those kind of things will go a long way in determining a winner in this game. It doesn’t just go to pass game, its run game also. They’ve been able to methodically move those chains, we’ve been good at creating some lost yardage plays, that’ll be a good battle also.”
You can watch the full press conference from Reich and Schwartz below.
