Eagles' offense worried? Lane Johnson contradicts himself

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Some are looking at the Eagles' shaky 19-10 win over the Raiders on Monday as a sign of trouble on the horizon with the playoffs fast approaching. Lane Johnson, on the other hand, might tell those people they should be grateful for what they were given on Christmas Day.

"If we win, we win," Johnson said from the Eagles' locker room postgame. "It's just at a point though where we're winning the game, nobody's satisfied anymore.

"We won the game. That's all that matters."

That may be, but could you imagine Johnson saying something similar when the Eagles were deep into their nine-game winning streak earlier this season?

Probably not, because it wasn't happening.

To be fair, Johnson wasn't trying to make the case the Eagles performed up to expectations against the Raiders. Quite the contrary. The Pro Bowl right tackle understands that the offensive performance probably wouldn't be enough to beat most teams in the postseason.

The Eagles mustered 216 yards of total offense and found the end zone only once while turning the ball over twice in the victory.

"We're not proud," Johnson said. "We didn't play well. We didn't execute well. Even though we won, we're still not happy with how we did. Moving forward in the playoffs, we have a lot of stuff to fix."

At the same time, Johnson didn't seem to think there's a whole lot of validity to questions of whether the Eagles are regressing.

"If we don't win in a certain fashion, there's going to be, 'Hey, we're not good enough,'" Johnson said. "I've been hearing it my whole career. It's so ridiculous.

"Moving forward, we have to drown out distractions and try to win one game at a time, because it's really hard."

The win on Monday moved the Eagles' record to 13-2 and clinched the top playoff seed in the NFC. It was also their third consecutive W.

It was also the third straight in which the Eagles played poorly in at least one phase and the third that required late-game heroics to secure the outcome. And not coincidentally, it was the third game the team finished without starting quarterback Carson Wentz.

There's good reason for the increasing concern outside the Eagles' locker room.

Johnson's comments also seem to indicate a shift in his own philosophy from earlier this season.

The fifth-year veteran compared the offense's performance versus the Raiders to how the unit fared in the Eagles' 33-10 win over the 49ers back in October. Yet, the difference in Johnson's sentiment less than two months later following a similar result is startling.

"I feel like a loss right now," Johnson said immediately after the 49ers game. "Just the way that we performed in the first half is not the way that we wanted to execute."

For the most part, Eagles players are continuing to say the right things — although some might be feeling additional pressure since Wentz went down.

Last week, Eagles cornerback Ronald Darby aimed a Twitter rant at his critics after a poor performance by the secondary in a win over the Giants. And safety Malcolm Jenkins, while attempting to rationalize Darby's outburst, may have inadvertently slipped in a little commentary about the atmosphere surrounding the franchise.

"We understand that we play in Philly, so we're looking for every reason to create a panic," Jenkins said Monday.

Can't think of any legitimate reason why the fans would panic about every mistake right now, big or small.

Johnson and his teammates are correct that the important thing is the Eagles ultimately defeated the Raiders. It would also be accurate to say many of the recent issues are correctable, and the squad could be firing on all cylinders come January.

But it feels like the mood has changed as the Eagles begin to realize their margin for error has been dramatically reduced. All of a sudden, a win that might've felt like a loss in October has become one everybody should be happy about in December.

So if nobody seems satisfied by a narrow victory over an opponent flying across the country to play on Christmas Day having just been eliminated from playoff contention, that's at least partly a result of the mindset Johnson and the Eagles instilled all season long — up until now.

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