Over the last four weeks, Cal Adomitis spent a lot of time alone on a football field.
After losing a position battle in Cincinnati this summer, Adomitis went home to Pittsburgh and tried to stay ready. While his family was at work, the veteran long snapper spent hours during the day at J.C. Stone Field at North Park in Wexford, Pennsylvania, working on his craft.
“It was nice,” Adomitis said this week. “Super peaceful.”
Adomitis, 27, would set up a towel on the soccer net, prop up his phone to record, break out his bag of footballs and snap them repeatedly into the towel. Over and over again.
The Eagles this week signed Adomitis as their new long snapper, replacing veteran Charley Hughlett, who landed on IR after having core muscle surgery this week.
While Adomitis admitted it stung when he was released by the Bengals, getting to step away for a while rekindled his love for football.
“Obviously, it’s a love-hate relationship everyone has with camp and coming out of camp it’s a lot going right into the season,” he said. “In a weird way, it was really nice for me to have a couple weeks to just go do my own work and spend some time with my family and re-find my love for football and snapping footballs.”
The Eagles this offseason moved on from longtime long snapper and two-time Super Bowl champion Rick Lovato and signed Hughlett, who spent the previous 10 years with the Browns. But Hughlett lasted just four games this season.
Adomitis knows Hughlett a little bit. They were in the same division for a few seasons, but said their longest talk actually came this preseason when the Eagles hosted the Bengals. Now, Adomitis has replaced Hughlett and will be spending a lot of time with Jake Elliott and Braden Mann.
“They’re a lot of fun to work with and it’s a great specialist room to find myself in,” he said. “It stinks to see what happened to Charley. He’s a great dude and a great snapper and a guy that I certainly looked up to as a long snapper. But it’s a blessing for me to be in this specialist room with them because they’re really good guys and really good players.”
A Tush Push ally?
The Eagles’ signature play has been under attack throughout the first quarter of the 2025 season after a vote to ban it failed this offseason. But the play has at least one ally this week.
“I was one that stood up in favor of it,” Broncos head coach Sean Payton said to reporters in Denver this week. “The reason I stood up in favor of is pretty simple. If the powers to be don’t want it for aesthetic reasons, or competitive reasons, or it’s hard to officiate, etcetera. I’ve been involved in those meetings for a long time, and when all of the sudden health and safety was pulled into that which might be the safest play in football, my [B.S.] nose kind of went up.
“It’s a quarterback sneak, and I think credit Philadelphia. They scored a touchdown last week. Take a peek at this past week’s touchdown off the tush push look, and it was a sweep to the left. I’m one that looks at it as long as the line of scrimmage is clean, that it’s a well-run quarterback sneak. When you really evaluate it, it’s more the technique of the sneak than the push. You go all the way back to Green Bay against Dallas in the ‘Ice Bowl’ and Bart Starr crosses the goal line with someone pushing a little bit behind him. So I was one that was in favor of leaving it alone on Philly’s side.”
Payton might have been on the Eagles’ side of the Tush Push debate but his team was not. The Broncos were one of the 22 teams that voted to ban the play in May.
In fact, the only opponent on the Eagles’ 2025 schedule that voted with the Eagles on the Tush Push vote was Detroit. The Lions showed some guts.
Bringing juice on special teams
Cameron Latu has become one of the feel-good stories of the 2025 season. The 49ers took Latu in the third round out of Alabama in the 2023 draft but his first NFL regular season action came agains the Chiefs in Week 2.
In that game, Latu came close to blocking a couple punts and he finally got one in Week 4 against the Buccaneers. It was a huge way to start that game.
“Yeah, he’s brought a physical presence, obviously some athleticism, and a lot of energy,” special teams coordinator Michael Clay said. “You see it on the sideline, you see it after some plays with the special teams unit. They’re getting up, they’re celebrating, and it’s not just Cam. I know you just specifically picked out Cam, and like I said a couple of weeks ago, it’s a heck of a story kind of bouncing around the league last couple of years to find a niche, whether it’s a fullback or tight end, but also playing special teams.
“He’s helping out the unit in any way he can, and obviously, he started with the tone against Tampa Bay with that huge block.”
Latu, 25, was elevated from the practice squad for the Chiefs and Rams games and was then signed to the active roster before the Bucs game. So he’s now on the 53. In his three NFL games, Latu has played 19 snaps on offense as a fullback and 54 on special teams. He has turned into a core special teamer.
The holes aren’t there
The Eagles’ offense last year was built on the strength of its run game and that’s just not there so far in 2025. Maybe you wonder about the toll a 2,000-yard season had on Saquon Barkley but he doesn’t appear to be the problem.
It just doesn’t seem like there are the holes there for him right now.
And the numbers back that up.
In 2024, Barkley led all NFL running backs in yards before contact (1,328) and yards before contact per attempt (3.8). Those numbers are down drastically in 2025. Through four games this season, Barkley is 15th in yards before contact (129) and 33rd in yards before contact per attempt (1.7).
This basically just backs up the eye test. Right now, the offensive line isn’t as good as it was a year ago and the run game isn’t the same.
Joy in wins
The Eagles are 4-0 but they haven’t played a complete game yet. It’s a bit of a quandary. On one hand, winning in the NFL is hard and you should celebrate it. On the other, there’s an obvious fear that the wins won’t keep coming if the Eagles don’t improve.
Nick Sirianni has talked in the past about the importance of feeling joy in the process and that’s still important to him.
“Yeah, you got to give yourself points for wins,” Sirianni said. “We’re going to feel terrible about ourselves when we lose. If you’re going to take away points when you lose, you got to give yourself points for wins and you got to enjoy it because I mean, you’re doing all these things because you love it, you’re doing all these things so you can go out there and be at your best. You’re doing all these things that we do throughout a week to continue to get better and you have to be able to celebrate that when you win. I think we got a lot better feel of that than we have had in the past.”
Not only are the Eagles 4-0 this season but they have won 20 of their last 21 games and the only loss during that stretch came in Washington last season after Jalen Hurts was knocked out of the game.
But since 2000, there have been 71 teams to start their season with a perfect 4-0 record. The Eagles’ point differential of +20 is tied for the worst margin among those 71 teams. But they’re tied with the 2024 Chiefs, who went to Super Bowl LIX before ultimately losing to the Eagles.
“I feel bad that you guys can’t come into the locker room until 15 minutes afterwards because there’s nothing like that feeling after a win that you get,” Sirianni said. “And you got to be able to enjoy that and you got to be able to celebrate that. But that doesn’t mean that there’s any contentment in any way because that’s how I’m looking at every time. Not if we won or lost, not if we won or lost the game, but did we play to our standard in toughness, right? Did we play to our standard in detail? Did we play our standard in together?”
Read the full article here
