Doug Pederson, Eagles don't regret going for 2 at end of loss to Ravens

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BALTIMORE — Doug Pederson didn’t think twice. He was going to go for it.

“I wanted to win the football game,” Pederson said.

Didn’t happen.

Carson Wentz led the Eagles down the field with under two minutes left in Sunday’s game against the Ravens and pushed across the goal line for a touchdown that would have been good enough to tie the game. If the Eagles chose to kick an extra point.

Instead, with just four seconds left to go, Pederson kept his offense on the field. Win or lose, the game was ending in regulation.

It ended with a 27-26 loss (see Instant Replay) as Wentz’s slant pass intended for Jordan Matthews on the two-point conversion attempt was batted at the line of scrimmage by linebacker C.J. Mosley and fell incomplete.

“I loved it,” Wentz said of the decision to go for it. “I thought it showed Coach’s aggressiveness and his belief in us. I thought we had it. They made a good play. They got their hand up at the line of scrimmage and it just didn’t go our way today.”

The play didn’t work, but Pederson’s players seemed to like the decision to go for the win. Players on the sideline were fired up when the offense stayed on the field (see Roob's 10 observations).

“It’s tough, but I’d rather go out swinging this way than kind of go into overtime,” tight end Zach Ertz said. “Doug’s got full faith in us. It speaks volumes. You love to have a head coach that has that trust in you as players and as an offense because he’s an offensive coach, obviously. We already scored once on a two-point earlier in the game. So as the offense, we had the mentality that we were going to win the game right there.”

The Eagles anticipated that the Ravens would blitz on the play and they were right. That’s why they called that particular play; Pederson called it a “staple play” against that defense.

It just didn’t go their way.

With the loss, the Eagles fell to 5-9, clinched a losing season and were officially eliminated from playoff contention.

When asked why he decided to go for two instead of kicking the field goal to take the game into overtime, Pederson said the Eagles had less than a 50 percent chance to win the game because they were underdogs coming in and because Baltimore has the best kicker in the league.

The decision to go for the two-point conversion was less curious than the one to have undrafted rookie running back Byron Marshall on the field for it instead of veteran Ryan Mathews, who had his best game of the season. Mathews even punched in a two-point conversion earlier in the game.

“I got faith in my teammates,” said Mathews, who ran for 128 yards on 20 carries. “Everybody wants to play, but I have faith in my teammates.”

Mathews claimed he wasn’t hurt at the end of the game, but this was just a specific package that didn’t include him.

“I felt like the play was there, you know what I’m saying? It’s one thing if the play wasn’t there,” Jordan Matthews said, when asked what he thought about Ryan Mathews’ not being on the field. “The guy just made a good play on it and tipped it. And even if the guy doesn’t tip it, we probably would have gotten the call. The ref told me you would have gotten the call, but the ball was tipped. So it’s not like it was essentially a bad play call. If we converted it, then nobody’s mentioning that.”

Six of the Eagles’ nine losses this season have come by seven points or fewer. And in back-to-back weeks, they had a chance at the end to win the game.

“It seems like all of our games have been like that,” Wentz said. “It seems like it comes down to one or two plays every game. This time, that play came at the end. We just need to keep building on our success.”

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