Evaluating through injury is difficult.
When you’re watching as a third party — not a member of the personnel department, but of the media — you have to try to connect the sparse, distant dots of presser quotes and estimated recovery times to determine how healthy a player is. The NFL season wears on every player, but those who rush back from injury — or play through it all together — bear the burden more noticeably from a performance perspective.
It’s this difficulty that created the rather interesting dichotomy for Eagles fans and analysts (this one included!