The frustrations continue for Eagles receiver A.J. Brown. And those frustrations continue to manifest themselves in various ways.
On Tuesday night, Brown said during a Twitch stream, “If you got me on fantasy, man, get rid of me.”
On Wednesday, he declined to apologize for the comments he made in that setting.
“After the game, I said all the right answers, and y’all still made a story,” Brown told reporters. “In that moment where I’m just talking to my friend, having fun with my friend, I’m not apologizing for that. . . . If you have eyes, you can see that, and so it’s not like I was throwing anybody under the bus. I’m literally trying to laugh through this shit. This shit is tough. But I’m trying to make fun of the situation and to try to get through it.”
Brown otherwise attempted to explain his lingering frustrations by saying that they arise from a desire for the offense to improve.
“Last year, what it was, ‘Thank you for the ring,’” Brown said. “But it’s a new season. [Defenses] adapted, we have to adapt. And we have to continue to like get better and find new ways.”
Brown wants the team to come up with ways that will make better use of his skills and abilities.
“We do need to do a better job of creating for me, trying to help put me in a situation to help to contribute,” Brown said. “But right now it just feels as if I’m screwing it up for everybody.”
He wants to not screw things up. He wants to make a positive difference.
“I see the offense struggling, and I want to help contribute,” Brown said. “And I didn’t get those opportunities. And so, like, I’m gonna have a problem with that, especially with the player that I am, and especially with the player like you want me to be.”
The overriding point is that Brown wants to see the offense perform more efficiently and successfully.
“We can’t just keep slapping a Band-Aid over the defense doing their job and getting us out of trouble,” Brown said. “At what point are we going to pick up our slack as an offense that we say we’re so great? . . . And that’s what I’m getting at. It’s not about, ‘I don’t care about winning, all I care about is stats.’ No. It’s been week after week sometimes we’re not contributing, we’re not doing our job on offense. You can’t keep slapping a Band-Aid over that and expect to win late in the year and think you’re going to go to that at the end of the year. It’s not going to fucking happen.”
Brown knows that, by speaking out, not everyone will understand that his concerns flow from a desire to improve the offense, and not from wanting to get the ball in his hands more often.
“I don’t care if I’m misunderstood, like, I’ll stand up in front of that and fall on that sword over and over again,” Brown said. “Like, it’s about doing what we’re supposed to be doing on offense. And if we are really in this business for trying to get better, we gotta do what we gotta do. And not just say, ‘Oh, it’s about wins, like, as long as we got the win, it’s cool.’ No, that ain’t — you cannot do that, not in this league. We gotta continue to get better.”
Currently, the Eagles’ offense lacks a true identity. Against the Vikings, they threw the ball effectively. Against the Giants, they ran it effectively. Against the Packers (and during other games), it seemed as if the Eagles were using a random play generator — with the exception of the deployment of the tush push during short-yardage situations.
The next challenge comes on Sunday night, against the Lions. And while a win will be nice, Brown believes it will be much nicer to see the offense improving as the regular season inches closer and closer to the playoffs.
As to the question of whether Brown should be so open about his frustrations, this isn’t new. The Eagles could have tried to trade him. They didn’t.
It will be interesting to see whether that changes when the 2025 season ends. How it ends for the Eagles may have a lot to do with that.
Eagles right tackle Lane Johnson had his left ankle rolled in the first half Monday night. He later returned and ended up playing 37 snaps, the same as his replacement, Fred Johnson.
The good news for the Eagles is: Lane Johnson is listed with a limited practice on Wednesday’s estimated report.
The Eagles also had left guard Landon Dickerson (quad), right guard Tyler Steen (oblique) and center Cam Jurgens (knee) also listed as limited. Jurgens has not played since Week 7.
Long snapper Cal Adomitis (finger), cornerback Jakorian Bennett (pectoral), wide receiver Darius Cooper (shoulder), offensive lineman Willie Lampkin (knee/ankle) and outside linebacker Nolan Smith (triceps) were full participants.
The YouTube TV blackout of Disney-owned channels has kept a pair of Monday Night Football games from being televised to millions of viewers. Even without that extra audience, the Week 10 game between the Eagles and Packers did well.
ESPN has announced that the game’s multicast on ABC, ESPN, ESPN+, ESPN Deportes, and NFL+ averaged 20.6 million viewers.
Which begs the question: How much bigger would the number have been if the game had been available on YouTube TV?
The press release includes a predictable boast regarding the Week 10 2025 audience in comparison to the Week 10 2024 Monday night audience, which was not televised by the three-letter broadcast network but only on ESPN, ESPN Deportes, and NFL+.
Last week’s ratings release didn’t mention the Week 9 2024 audience, since the Week 9 2025 numbers reflected a 21.4-percent drop.
ESPN P.R. has not yet posted the latest figures on Twitter, possibly because last week’s ESPN P.R. tweet regarding the Cardinals-Cowboys audience was hit with a Community Note regarding the failure to include the comparison to the same week from the prior season.
The Lions voted against banning the tush push this offseason, and head coach Dan Campbell says he’ll never vote to ban a play just because another team is doing it well.
Campbell said today that he feels strongly that physical plays should remain in the game of football, and as his team prepares to face the Eagles on Sunday, stopping the tush push is a job for the Lions’ defense, not for the league.
“I’m a purist,” Campbell said. “You take something else out of the game, then we’re taking the next thing out of the game, then we take another thing out of the game, and pretty soon we don’t have pads anymore. Then pretty soon it’s, we’re only playing 30 minutes. I don’t want to take it out of the game. It’s something a team’s got a niche, they’ve found something, they’re good at it, and it’s for everybody else to stop. It’s unique and it’s physical and more than anything I just don’t want to take anything else out of the game. I just want to leave the game alone. That’s me.”
Campbell’s defense will have its chance to stop the tush push on Sunday night.
The Eagles continue to have an A.J. Brown problem. Mainly because they continue to fail to get the ball to A.J. Brown as often as they should.
He had two targets on Monday night before an analytics-defying fourth-down decision to throw a home run ball from the Green Bay 35 while Philly held a three-point lead.
Coach Nick Sirianni said after the game that the goal was to end it with a touchdown on a 50-50 ball to a single-covered Brown. If the pass hadn’t been underthrown, that may have happened. But it was, and the pass was incomplete. If the Eagles had blown the game, Sirianni would have never heard the end of it.
As it stands, he’s not hearing the end of questions about Brown. On Tuesday night, Brown said during a Twitch stream, “If you got me on fantasy, man, get rid of me.”
During his Wednesday press conference, Sirianni was asked about Brown’s latest remarks.
“Yeah, guys, I’m close to being done answering these questions with this,” Sirianni said, via Sports Radio 94WIP.com. “He’s working hard and he is a big part of this game plan and will be a big part of the game plan going forward. And, he’s working like crazy when he’s here and I’m excited to have him.”
In eight games this season, Brown has 31 catches for 408 yards and three touchdowns. More than a fourth of those yards came during a Week 7 game against the Vikings, during which Brown caught four passes for 121 yards and two touchdowns.
His three targets on Monday night were his second-lowest of the season. And Brown has been vocal in the past about his frustrations.
For good reason. He’s a rare talent, the kind of player who should be getting the ball thrown his way whenever he’s in single coverage. That’s currently not happening. Until it does, the issues will continue — whether Sirianni wants to answer questions about it or not.
The best way to not answer questions about it is to end the questions. And the questions will end once the Eagles take full advantage of Brown’s skills, starting on Sunday night against the Lions.
Until that happens, only one question is necessary: Why aren’t they doing it?
