Eagles injury report: Should Sirianni rest his starters against Dallas?

The Eagles have released their status report ahead of this weekends’ season finale against the Dallas Cowboys. The team ran a walkthrough today so the injury report is only an estimation, but gives us a pretty good idea of what we can expect.

Three players missed practice fully today and one of them was Miles Sanders. The good news is that the Eagles are hoping to have him back for the teams’ wildcard matchup and there was never any expectation for him to play this week.

Landon Dickerson and Lane Johnson are both listed as questionable. The rookie has missed two consecutive practices with a thumb injury and as for Johnson, it would hardly make sense for the Eagles to risk their franchise RT if he’s less than 100%. I think it’s unlikely either play on Sunday, but in reality, every starter should either be benched or see minimal exposure.

Nick Sirianni has remained on the fence as to whether or not he will rest his starters on Saturday:

 That’s still something that we’re discussing and we’re working through. So, everybody is ready to go. Even the guys that are out of the building right now are ready to go this week because of the preparation that we’ve had by everybody throughout the week. 

And so that’s just still something – again, we’re sorting through. Every situation will be looked at differently. We are very aware that we don’t control our own destiny, as far as the six or seven seed, like you referred to. 

So, again, we’re not in control over when the guys get back with COVID. We’re not in control over guys that are dealing with some bumps and bruises and injuries. So, everybody is being discussed, as far as – everybody is being treated as a different scenario. 

We’ve discussed all these, we are continuing to discuss all these, but our goal is to win this football game against a rival. I know that’s their goal as well, and that should be all of our goals. 

So, we’re ready to go. We are prepared and not – and everybody is prepared because we know there are a lot of different scenarios as far as guys’ availability and stuff like that at this particular point. 

We’re not coming out with an injury report yet because we have a little bit more time to discuss that. We had an early practice/walk-through, so we have time to continue to talk about that. So, we’re going to use all our time and we’ll let you guys know as soon as possible with some of that stuff. 

But we’re going through a lot of discussions right now.

– Nick Sirianni

The seeding won’t change that drastically and it’s not like it would be a considerable advantage anyway. It would behoove the team, who have been healthy all year, to rest players who have endured bumps in what’s been a really gruelling run since the bye week.

That includes QB Jalen Hurts and quite literally everyone else at this point. If the Eagles are going to tempt fate and run vital cogs of their machine out onto the field for a meaningless matchup, then it may only yield negative results.

The smartest and safest thing to do would be to use this as an opportunity to rest key players before the first taste of playoff football in the Nick Sirianni era.