The play worked all week in practice. It just didn't work in the game.
The Eagles trailed 27-24 in the fourth quarter and faced a fourth-and-6 from the Bears' 42-yard line with 9:28 remaining in the contest. Punter Chas Henry lined up in what looked like an attempt to punt the ball deep in Chicago territory. Instead, Henry took the snap and saw gunner Colt Anderson wide open to the left. Henry, however, didn't get a good pass off and it fell short and incomplete.
The Bears took advantage of the good field position and padded their lead with a 22-yard Robbie Gould field goal and won 30-24 on Monday night in Philadelphia.
"I just didn't get a good grip on the ball," Henry said. "I saw he was wide open sitting over there. I just babied it over there. It was everything we had executed and done in practice. I just didn't execute it in the game."
On film, the Eagles saw that the Bears featured a punt rush that would leave the gunner alone and have that defender rush from the middle while someone from the box would rotate to pick up the gunner. When they Bears showed that look, the fake punt was on.
"They were going for the block," Anderson said. "That field position, it's right in the middle of the field. We just thought that we could make that play and it didn't work."
Head coach Andy Reid said that he always wants his teams to be aggressive.
"It's very seldom that you have a guy completely uncovered out there," Reid said. "We had a chance to make a big play, so that was the decision made. We didn't execute it quite right."
The fake punt overshadowed a performance where Bobby April's special teams unit corralled one of the great all-time returners in Devin Hester, who was held to one punt return for 19 yards and three kickoff returns for a total of 30 yards.
"He's a dynamic guy and I think we did a pretty good job of limiting what he could do," Henry said. "That one (missed fake) hurts a little bit, especially after we ran it in practice and got it every single time."
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