Mounting pressure getting to Sirianni
Coach trying to stop team’s sudden nosedive
PHILADELPHIA – For two years and 11 games, the challenge Nick Sirianni always thought he wanted was proving to be easy.
He believed he was meant to be a football coach, that it was a family tradition, and he believed he could succeed at the level where only 31 others in the world would be permitted to work.
He was in the playoffs and the Super Bowl and, at one point, in tears, so grateful he was to live the NFL dream.
He had one of the best quarterbacks in the league, a sturdy offensive line, good assistants, good fans and a good chance to help Jeff Lurie fulfill his promise of delivering multiple championships to Eagles fans.
Literally and otherwise, it just seemed that every bounce was going his way, and that his most difficult daily choice was whether to go with the Bryce Harper replica or the Allen Iverson throw-back for his next made-for-TV press stunt.
And he was good at what he was doing. Good with the players. Good with the press. Great with Jalen Hurts, helping him to grow into a quarterback worthy of the priciest contract in the history of football. He was running a proud program, with no known internal static. Most of the time, he was winning.
Easy.
That’s how it seemed.
Then came the wrong end of 2023, the reality and a challenge he has no guarantee of successfully meeting. For does anyone really know if a 42-year-old with 54 major-league games on his record can find a way to worm out of a run of adversity? Is it for sure that Sirianni’s Eagles, losers of four of their last five, are just in a lull, or if opposing coaches and coordinators have figured them out? And what about the off-field challenges that come with a slump — the in-room cracks, the self-applied pressure, the heat from the media, the panic that can stir when selfdoubt lurks?
It’s right to judge Sirianni on what he has done but it’s right to wonder what will happen every time he goes through something for the first time.
And in his first time under pressure, he’s not looking good.
“Obviously, any time you go through a rut like this, yeah, it’s tough,” Sirianni said, a day after a loss to the Arizona Cardinals. “I think that we have all been through things in our lives that we would all agree are tougher and we know we came out better because of it. You remind yourself of that, those types of things, in these types of moments.”
Throw that quote on one of those inspirational posters and sell it on eBay. But there have been many good coaches and decent men who have met adversity in the NFL and also met a human resources director on Black Monday. Not that Sirianni’s seat is hot — he is two years from that — but gassing about hard times being strengthening agents is cheap blabber.
The sports solar system is thick with coaches or managers who have proven capable of fighting through the taxing times. But it should concern Eagles fans that Sirianni is not handling the first real crisis point of his head coaching career with any sense of command.
His second best offensive player, A.J. Brown, basically said if he couldn’t say anything nice he wouldn’t say anything at all, and has avoided the media ever since. For some reason, Sirianni’s defensive players have begun to make less contact than Nick Castellanos in an NLCS. While it is impossible to measure, there seems to be a fresh anxiousness in the room. More easily proven is that Sirianni is feeling the stress, for he has copped to showing too much tension. And if nothing else revealed his inexperience, he effectively already has changed defensive coordinators — clearly a panic move.
“When you’re in a hole like we’re in right now — just not playing and coaching the way we want to do things — yeah, that’s always tough because you put everything you’ve got into this,” Sirianni said. “You think about everything. You sacrifice everything. You put everything into it. So of course, when you’re not seeing the rewards of it, you’re upset, but you can only be upset for so long, and you can only be down for so long because you’ve got to get back up and figure out what the solutions are and what the answers are to the issues that are going on.”
The Eagles will be in the playoffs. Sirianni deserves credit for that. They are likely to finish the season at 12-5. Nice. But should they bumble in the postseason and roll into the offseason with aging players and an improving division and doubt, then Sirianni can remember that Lurie showed Doug Pederson to the door three years after he won the whole thing.
It’s what can happen when coaching in the NFL can prove tougher than it seems.