One more time, Nick Sirianni had spent several days seeking shelter from a storm whose clouds he had created. The Eagles’ 27-7 loss to the Bears last Monday had been a greatest-hits collection of the flaws his critics cite whenever they want to make a case that he’s the luckiest head coach in the NFL, that Howie Roseman’s brain and one of the league’s best rosters often save Sirianni from himself.
He had screamed an obscenity at Bears linebacker D’Marco Jackson just after Jackson had sent Jalen Hurts flying near the sideline. With the Eagles down by just two scores in the third quarter, he had decided to have his offense punt on fourth-and-1, seeming to freeze in the moment once he realized the distance to earn a first down was too long for Hurts to try a quarterback sneak. His team had been unprepared and overwhelmed from the start against third-string QB Case Keenum and a defense that doesn’t exactly recall Buddy Ryan, Mike Singletary, and the ’85 Bears.
Yes, it was another one of those weeks for Sirianni, which means it’s another one of those moments for Sirianni, the kind he has faced before during his five-plus seasons in Philadelphia. From a 2-5 start in 2021 to the Eagles’ free fall late in 2023, from teetering on the edge early in 2024 to winning a Super Bowl months later, he has these inflection points when it felt as if a season — or his career — could go either way. Find a way to win, and he quiets the noise and keeps his job. Fail to stop the spiral, and people start asking what Jeffrey Lurie might be thinking.
» READ MORE: Nick Sirianni has a lot of work to do, and not much time to do it, after Eagles’ weaknesses are exposed in Chicago
Now here’s his latest walk on the high wire. The Eagles are 2-1 but reeling after that embarrassing loss in Chicago, missing DeVonta Smith, Zack Baun, and several other key players, and hosting the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday — a championship-caliber team that’s ticked off that it’s 1-2. The following week, they travel to London to play the Jacksonville Jaguars, who are emerging as a contender in the AFC. No one should be surprised if the Eagles end up staring at a three-game losing streak and a 2-3 record out of these two weeks, and it’s on Sirianni to make sure everything doesn’t fall apart.
“Whether you win or you lose, you go through the same process,” he said. “I read something Kobe [Bryant] said: ‘You win, great. You’ve got to get up and do the same thing. You lose, it sucks, but you’ve got to get up and do the same thing.’ …
“I know it’s boring, and you can probably say, ‘Hey, that’s just coach-talk.’ But you’ve got to have faith in the process until the process produces results in everything that you do. So business as usual this week. I have a lot of faith in all the guys in this building. That’s why they’re in this building. That’s why they’re on the team.”
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Sirianni could have said the same thing in ’21, when the Eagles won seven of nine games and scratched into the playoffs, or in ’24, when they won 16 of 17 and earned the right to party in New Orleans in early February.
Those turnarounds came with strategic changes on offense, sure, and Sirianni and Sean Mannion might need to rethink their approach. But first things first: Sirianni and his players can’t allow that Bears loss to snowball into an avalanche.
“You make the corrections, but you don’t stay on it too long,” defensive tackle Moro Ojomo said. “You can’t let a team beat you twice. We’ve got to game-prep, and we’ve got a hell of a team coming in. They’re a playoff team. They’ve been a great team. So you’ve got to flush that really quick. If you don’t, you’re going to lose twice on the same thing. You’ve probably got 24 hours to deal with it. That’s it.”
The good thing for Sirianni and his team this time is that the standard for success has to be different, has to be a little lower. Losses to the Rams and to the Jaguars wouldn’t necessarily be the worst possible outcomes for them. The nature of those losses — of how the Eagles play — would matter more. Put simply, even if they go down, the Eagles have to go down fighting. They can’t get blown out again. They have to remain competitive. They have to give everyone, themselves included, reason to believe they can turn things around once they get healthier, once all their defensive starters settle into Vic Fangio’s system, once Mannion has more opportunities to show whether he’s the budding genius the Eagles have billed him to be.
» READ MORE: A mystifying trend the Eagles must fix, and everything else to know ahead of Sunday’s game
A 2-3 start is still too early in a season to write off any team, especially one that has qualified for the playoffs five years running. After Jacksonville, the Eagles get the Carolina Panthers and the Dallas Cowboys, both at home, so the schedule will ease up a bit, at least in theory. The most important task for Sirianni over the next month is to hold the locker room and the coaching staff together, to prevent what happened in 2023 — one awful loss leading to another and another, morale plummeting, veterans looking out for themselves instead of focusing on the team’s greater good — from happening again.
“You get in a bind,” Ojomo said, “and it’s hard to get out of it.”
For the Eagles and their head coach, then, the mission is simple: Don’t get in one.
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Just a few months ago, when Eagles training camp got underway, the defense drew rave reviews. The prevailing sentiment was that the unit was poised to dominate this year. So far through three games, Vic Fangio’s group has done anything but. From the lack of forced turnovers to missed coverage assignments, the Eagles have plenty of room for improvement. Can Fangio work his magic to get the defense on track in time for this week’s showdown with the high-powered LA Rams? The Inquirer’s Jeff McLane puts the defense under the microscope, and also answers listener questions in this week’s mailbag. Listen here.
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