Brandon Graham is in the midst of a career year, but the seventh-year defensive end made a critical mistake late in the Eagles' 27-13 loss to the Packers on Monday Night Football.
On a 3rd-and-5 in the fourth quarter, Graham jumped offsides, giving the Packers an automatic first down early in a drive that wound up chewing up over eight minutes of clock and eliminating any chance of an Eagles comeback.
Graham joined TCN's Breakfast on Broad on Tuesday and said he was hard on himself after committing the late-game blunder, while also emphasizing the need for the Eagles to play looser and have more fun.
“Yeah we lost the last two weeks, but we gotta have a little more fun,” Graham said. “I think when things get a little tense, pressure bursts pipes. And that's what started happening on that last drive. Like, I made a mistake and I kept beating myself up about it during that whole drive because we couldn't get off the field.
"I feel like it's just too tense and we gotta go out there and we gotta play loose. And I was tense this last game because when things wasn't going well, I was talking to people, but I wasn't having as much fun as I could have with my teammates, even when things were bad. So we gotta start being better in that area.”
In what was deemed a must-win game for both teams, Aaron Rodgers and Co. made the Eagles’ stout defense look everything but that, carving them up for 313 passing yards and two touchdowns.
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The Eagles’ second consecutive loss dropped them under .500 for the first time this season and moved them 1½ games behind the Redskins for the second wild-card spot, with a number of teams vying for the position.
“We gotta get back to having fun,” Graham said. “[We're going to] make mistakes, but we just gotta keep rallying each other. And I think that's gonna be the message this week: Let's just go out, let's just have fun these last five games and see what happens. Don't put too much pressure on yourself.”
At 5-6, the Eagles' remaining five games are essentially all must-wins if they want even a chance at playing past Week 17 (see story). Despite their bleak playoff outlook, Graham doesn’t want this season to fall by the wayside because of the work that this Eagles team put in during the offseason.
“With Doug, I love our coach. I love our situation,” Graham said. “It sucks by the end of the season, things kind of shuffle around and you get a new team and all that. I wanna take advantage of this team that we got right now because we worked too hard in the offseason to let it slip like this. We worked entirely too hard, especially our minicamp was the best, man. We just had so much fun and we have to get back to that.”
For more from Graham, check out the video above.
