When OTAs ended in mid-June, Zach Ertz wasn’t so sure about Carson Wentz.
“I wasn’t with him every day from the end of OTAs to training camp so when we left after OTAs he still wasn’t very confident, I would say,” Ertz remembered.
“He didn’t trust the brace in particular, he was annoyed by it.”
Six weeks later?
“When I came back for training camp and he was moving around like his old self is when I was like, ‘Man, he made some drastic improvement in those six weeks that we had off,” Ertz said.
“From the moment training camp started you couldn’t really tell he was coming off a major injury.”
You couldn’t tell Sunday, either.
NFL
Wentz played football for the first time in 9 ½ months and although it wasn’t his prettiest game ever, it was pretty darn great to see.
Wentz ran, scrambled, jumped, slid, eluded, dove, threw and willed the Eagles to a 20-16 win over the Colts Sunday at the Linc in his first appearance since he tore his knee in Los Angeles last December.
“Felt good,” Wentz said. “Felt good to finally be out there. It’s been a long time coming. A lot of excitement, a lot of emotions.”
If we didn’t know Wentz was back before, we definitely saw it on a 3rd-and-6 late in the second quarter when he escaped trouble in the pocket, took off toward the left sideline and literally flew in the air past the sticks for a first down.
That was the moment where you just took a deep breath and said, “He’s back.”
It was impressive. Even if Wentz wasn’t impressed.
“I thought it was a normal scramble to me,” he shrugged. “Made a guy miss in the pocket, saw the first down marker and go for it. Pretty standard for me.”
Wentz is now 13-2 in his career at the Linc and 19-11 as a starting quarterback.
He wasn’t perfect. He committed a couple bad turnovers – an interception and a fumble -- deep in Eagles territory in the third quarter that led to Colts field goals.
But the important thing is that he’s back, he’s healthy and he’s going to be leading this team to victories for a long, long time.
“It was exciting to get him back out there,” Doug Pederson said. “I know he’d probably want to get the fumble back, he’d want the pick back – those are things that can’t happen, especially backed up on our end of the field. But I thought for the first time back? Not bad.”
Not a knock on Nick Foles, who’s forever a legend in this city, but Wentz gives the offense a sense of order, a sense of consistency. He raises everybody’s level of play.
There’s just something magical about him.
“Same old Carson, honestly,” Ertz said. “He’s a winner. He’s a competitor. That’s why we love playing with him and for him. Because he’s going to do everything he can to win.
“He instills confidence in this team that no matter what we’re going through, we’re going to win.”
Even the guys on defense noticed that.
“He’s an electric player and he does some things that are just flat-out special,” Malcolm Jenkins said. “I think it definitely gave us juice as a team and made us better. It’s just fun to watch.”
Playing without half the Eagles’ receivers and backs, Wentz still completed 68 percent of his passes for 255 yards with a TD to Dallas Goedert and the one interception.
But Wentz has never been about stats or numbers. In the end, he did on a surgically repaired knee the exact same thing he did before he got hurt.
He won.
And knee surgery or no knee surgery, that’s what he’s best at.