‘I see a team that is really close together’
Sirianni about to see how hard it is to win in the NFL
The social media promo begins with Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, clad in a bathrobe and holding a coffee mug, walking down the steps of a house.
A newspaper flies past his head while a “Go Birds” voice trails off.
The video continues with fellow Eagles captain Brandon Graham trashtalking a practice dummy. In another scene, Lane Johnson and Brandon Brooks are meditating on yoga mats on the practice field.
Their mantra: “Go Birds.”
After more silliness, veteran tight end Zach Ertz, sporting a new hair color says, “Oh, I thought you said go blond. Go Birds!”
Cute. Catchy. Maybe it will translate to the field. Rookie head coach Nick Sirianni and his coaching staff are about to see how hard it is to win in the NFL.
“I see a team that is really close together,” Sirianni said Tuesday. “I see a team that has continued to improve their fundamentals. I was watching third down on the offense, we were just really crisp in the fundamentals, in the pass game. Every play I was watching with the guys, I was like, ‘This is exactly how you do it, this is exactly how you do it.’ That is a good feeling as a coach, to really feel like we’re getting better.”
Truth be told, the veterans and new faces in that promo including first-round draft pick DeVonta Smith aren’t sure what it will look like when the Eagles open the third new era since their winningest coach, Andy Reid, was axed after the 2012 season.
Curiosity abounds on both sides of the ball.
“Yeah, I mean we’re practicing it but now we’re going to put it on display,” Johnson said of the offense. “We have lots of big-time weapons. If we stay healthy up front, I think we can be a good group. You see plays being made in practice and you see good stuff. Now you just want to put it out there for the world to see. That’s what we’ve been building towards.”
Graham echoed his teammate. “I mean, I like what we’ve got so far,” he said. “Now we’ve got to go out there and see what it looks like.”
The Eagles were 4-11-1 last season, their worst campaign since Reid was shown the door. Former franchise quarterback Carson Wentz, bitter over being benched, was shipped to the Indianapolis Colts despite a record $33.8 million cap charge in dead money. Super Bowl winning head coach Doug Pederson was fired. General manager Howie Roseman and his team emerged from that train wreck with the same control of the roster that so often frustrated Pederson.
Internally, Hurts, Smith, a healthy offensive line, and a defensive line full of age, youth and talent are viewed as the tickets out of the NFC East basement.
Externally it’s a matter of how many games the Eagles lose. Even their fanboys are having a tough time seeing eight wins in the new 17-game schedule that has them playing Tampa Bay, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco after the opener in Atlanta.
“Let them pick who they want to pick,” cornerback Darius Slay said. “Shoot, it’s a whole new year. I feel like if you didn’t win a Super Bowl everybody had a down year. Thirty-one other teams had a down year. But we’re going out there and compete and let them know who we are.”
Looking at the practices during training camp and the basic stuff the Eagles ran during the preseason, it’s clear that Sirianni and his staff are sticklers for fundamentals and techniques. Ball security drills are a staple. Pre-snap penalties are unforgivable.
The Sirianni offense is going to be running back and tight end heavy, Hurts operating an RPO scheme ideally setting up play-action passes to Smith, Jalen Reagor and Quez Watkins.
Anticipate a ton of bubble screens that get Sanders and running backs Boston Scott and rookie Kenneth Gainwell into space. Possibly even tight ends Ertz and Dallas Goedert. There will be a lot of crossing routes to Smith, Reagor and Ertz.
Points? We shall see. But the Eagles will get a lot of first downs.
“It’s the kickoff for the new season so everybody’s kind of hyped up and excited,” Sanders said. “Haven’t gotten no signs of Coach being nervous. I always come up to him and go ‘Coach, you nervous at all?’ It doesn’t seem like it. He’s just very excited, He’s been doing this for
a good amount of time. Just at a bigger role, that’s all.”
Defensively, it’s up to Fletcher Cox, Graham, Javon Hargrave, Josh Sweat, Derek Barnett, Ryan Kerrigan and rookie Milton Williams, the big guys up front to set the tone for the rest of the defense choreographed by Jonathan Gannon, a disciple of Mike Zimmer.
On special teams, you can do a lot worse than kicker Jake Elliott, even though he’s coming off a down season, having made just 14 of 19 field goal attempts while bricking a couple of PATs. The jury is out on 28-year-old punter Aaryn Siposs, who looked awful in the last preseason game.
Among others scrutinizing the Eagles this season is Seth Joyner, a feared, three-time Pro Bowl linebacker on the Bircs’ teams of the early 1990 s. Joyner appreciates Sirianni’s passion and attention to details, qualities always present in the great ones. But Joyner wonders how much the players learned during 90-minute training camp practices. And he rolled his eyes at the decision to play the starters, including Hurts, basically for only a couple of series in the preseason.
“What can you get done in 90 minutes?” Joyner said. “If you really stop and think about it by the time you warm up and do your stretch routine ... by the time you’ve done your individual stuff you’ve already eaten up 30 minutes right there so you really only have an hour to work. Chip Kelly started this ‘coach them in the meetings thing’ instead of, run it until it’s right. I thought that was the greatest flaw in the world.
“I know there are limits on practice time. The game is played on the football field and there’s only so much you can do in the classroom that can translate to the field. I’m a visual learner. You can talk to me until I’m blue in the face, you can lecture me but until I’ve seen it with my eyes and put together how it looks and feels in a physical kind of way it’s hard for me to pick it up. And I know there’s a lot of football players that learn that way. Everything they learn is on the field.”
Kelce said the players have been building toward the opener since Sirianni’s first press conference, when he accidentally referred to executive Don Smolenski as Don “Slowinski.”
“Whenever you’re playing a game with a coach who’s going into his first one, you’re always anticipating a little bit of unknown,” Kelce said. “How the flow of the game is going to go, how it’s going to get called. I thought Nick did a great job in the preseason. So, I expect that to continue. When you’re a new coach everybody is still trying to figure you out. … I’m excited to go out there and do this the first time with Nick and with this team.”
What else is there to say but, Go Birds. That’s the mantra of these Generation Next Eagles.