Timing right for Eagles to stick with Minshew
The game plan for the Eagles this season was simple, outlined by Jeffrey Lurie soon after the last one ended.
This, the owner decided, would be a time of transition. It would be an opportunity to grow with a young head coach and quarterback. It would be a free throw, a rare season without much pressure to return to the Art Museum.
But then, football happened.
And then, Nick Sirianni found himself where he never expected to be in Week 15 — with a chance at the playoffs and, thus, with the obligation to adapt on the fly.
A season of promising improvement in one-percent increments had become a fourweek scramble to reach the postseason.
A season of taking a look at one player or another, of waiting for former high draft picks to justify that status, of standing around on defense in bend-then-break confusion was mostly behind.
While the Eagles weren’t looking, it became time to play as if a championship were at stake. And if that meant that the plan to spend a season developing Jalen Hurts would have to be scrapped, well, difficult choices are what NFL coaches are enriched to make.
By the weekend, the Eagles will entertain Washington in a battle of 6-7 teams. Sirianni wasn’t particularly certain whether he would start Hurts or Gardner Minshew at quarterback. The issue, as it has been for three weeks, is Hurts’ ouchy ankle, which in theory would leave him at less than full gameday capacity. At least, that’s an issue of convenience just in case the head coach truly does have doubts about the best quarterback to lead a playoff spurt.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, just like I didn’t know last week exactly what was going to happen,” Sirianni said. “You want to make sure that you’re covered if one guy can’t play. So that’s it.”
So he’s hedging, and not just as a way to keep Washington ill-prepared. No, Sirianni has ordered Hurts and Minshew to split the first-team reps in practice this week, something few NFL coaches do without deep cause.
If Hurts is well enough to take half the reps, then he’s well enough to take them all. Yet something seems to be telling Sirianni that Minshew must be ready, too.
“I was hopeful two weeks ago at this time that Jalen was going to play,” Sirianni said. “He didn’t end up playing, as we know, but time is healing it, and again, we go back to our doctors, our trainers and our strength staff.
“We have good people in there working on him and getting him a little bit better each day.”
It’s already late in the week for that. More, it is late in the season for that. There is no more time for the Eagles to wait for some ankle specialist to clear Hurts when it was obvious in the Eagles’ last game that they are just as capable of winning with Minshew.
The 33-18 road victory over the New York Jets was more than a case of a backup quarterback completing 20 of 25 passes with two touchdowns against an overwhelmed franchise. Minshew has spent his three NFL seasons rolling out impressive stat lines and has been a more accomplished, better quarterback than Hurts at this point in their careers.
And is there any recent example in Eagles lore of a backup quarterback with a proven ability to put up staggering numbers taking advantage of a late-season opportunity and yielding history?
No, this is not a Carson Wentz-Nick Foles situation, and these are not the 2017 Eagles. But if Sirianni is serious about taking this bonus opportunity to win a playoff spot, then he must play his more accomplished and healthy quarterback and worry later about any developmental issues with Hurts.
“One game at a time,” Sirianni said. “Don’t think about the playoffs. One game at a time, and one day at a time. It’s what are we doing, again, to put ourselves in position to win this week. You can’t think about who we play after this. You can’t think about that we play them again in two weeks. You can’t think about the last game that we have. It’s only about this week.”
If so, then make it about this week and not some other week.
And if Minshew plays as well as he did against the Jets, then do the same thing next week.
Strange seasons happen in the NFL. Sirianni, 40, likely feels he will have many opportunities to coach in the playoffs in his career.
All he is guaranteed, though, is that he has an opportunity to coach in the playoffs this year.
“You can’t get too ahead of yourself,” he said. “How are we going to win this game this week? It’s going to be by going out there and having a great detailed walkthrough and detailed meetings today.” That’s part of it.
But it’s also about having the courage to use the better quarterback when the time to call that audible arises.