Eagles Rookie helps take the “scary” out of Commanders Elite receiver

PHILADELPHIA – Noted trash man Brandon Graham had a little piece of verbal garbage to throw Terry McLaurin’s way when the Eagles hosted the Commanders on Thursday night.

“I told him, 2-7 is going to get you, he’s going to get you,” Graham said on his way out of the locker room after the Eagles tagged Washington with a 26-18 loss in a matchup of NFC East heavyweights. “I didn’t know he was going to get him like that.”

The reference to 2-7 is the jersey number worn by Eagles rookie Quinyon Mitchell, and yes, the rookie cornerback got McLaurin, okay. It’s not clear how much Mitchell did, or Jayden Mitchell, who didn’t.

Either way, Mitchell covered McLaurin on 20 of 25 McLaurin routes, according to Next Gen Stats, and the one catch the receiver made wasn’t against him. So basically he shut him down.

Daniels, the Commanders’ rookie quarterback, looked like, well, a rookie. He never seemed to look McLaurin’s way. The receiver known as “Scary Terry,” wasn’t very scary at all despite entering the game as the NFL’s third-leading receiver with 47 receptions for 711 yards, an average of 15.1 yards per carry. catch and six touchdowns.

In the loss, he had one catch for 10 yards. Period. He was only targeted twice, and the first time didn’t come until the first quarter.

Was it because Mitchell locked him in or because Daniels, under duress from the Eagles’ pass rush most of the night, didn’t see him? What?

McLaurin said the Eagles didn’t do anything they didn’t expect.

“The ball just wasn’t coming my way,” he said. “It happens. I can only control what I can and I just want to focus on that.”

The recipient threw some flowers Mitchell’s way.

“I think he’s a good corner,” McLaurin said. “He played well, he didn’t play like a rookie.”

Mitchell is not a brash talker. Heck, he doesn’t even like to talk much about himself, so all he had to say about the job he did at McLaurin was, “I feel like we did it, defensively, we did a good job with him and their offense just limited explosives. I feel like we had good preparation and went out and executed.”

Head coach Nick Sirianni didn’t give Mitchell much credit either, calling the job on McLaurin “just good team defense.”

The corner and receiver will meet again on Dec. 22 in Landover, Md., for the rematch, so the less said the better, but Mitchell has shut down top-level receivers in the first 10 games of his career , probably long enough to make this determination: The Eagles have themselves a bona fide shutdown corner.

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