Eagles QB Jalen Hurts knew better than to dive too deep into Eagles’ head coach Nick Sirianni’s latest “great moment.” When reporters asked for his opinion on Sirianni’s snafu with Eagles fans after Sunday’s underwhelming win, Hurts deflected more heroically than Deadpool’s sword. No bullet was safe.
Hurts pretended to not know the full gravity of the situation, then supplied a politically correct answer with just the right amount of sass: “I’ve kind of been, you know, put on notice on some of it. I didn’t see anything, but I encouraged him to be himself, and so that’s who he is.”
For those living under a rock for the past few days, Sirianni is in seriously hot water. Like, hotter than a lobster trying to escape Maine. Sirianni has pushed all the wrong buttons through five weeks — through his thoughts, in his words, and in what he has done and in what he has failed to do.
“We thrive off the crowd when they cheer for us. That’s all I’ll say,” Sirianni said on Sunday. “When our crowd cheers for us, we thrive off of them. You know, we hear them when they boo. We don’t necessarily like it. I don’t think that’s productive for anybody. When they cheer for us and we’ve got them rolling, we love it.“
Sirianni’s demeanor in press conferences — rolling his eyes at times, smirking at fan-related questions, pounding the table arbitrarily, and (according to his harshest skeptics … we won’t judge) bringing human shields — isn’t helping his cause. So much so that the higher ups in the Eagles’ organization are apparently chirping in the head coach’s ear about changing his erratic behavior.
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeff McLane, some team officials were “embarrassed” by Sirianni’s decision to jaw with Eagles fans and told him to tone it down. His immutable actions have been steering the never-ending news cycle, with every talking head covering the NFL taking a turn at the wheel. “Clown” has been one popular buzzword. Another one? Well, Colin Cowherd said Sirianni reminds him of a “crypto bro” and “the crash is coming.”
Meanwhile, the Eagles’ offense remains in tatters. They still haven’t scored a single point in any first quarter this season, and it marks the first time the Eagles haven’t gotten on the scoreboard in the first period through the first five games since 1934. The slow starts illustrate an alarming trend, one that Sirianni can’t hide when you see that the team has just 106 total points which ranks eighth worst in the league.
“We’re going to figure it out. We’re going to fix it,” Sirianni said. “We’ve known how to score in the past. You guys have a job to do and you’re going to fixate on one thing and say, ‘Oh, they haven’t started fast and turned the ball over.’ We’ve got it. We’re going to do everything we can do to fix it.”
Constipated. Broken. Grounded. Pick a word. Nothing is sunny in Philadelphia right now.
“It’s hard to win,” Sirianni said on Sunday. “What we’ll do is we’ll stay hungry, we’ll stay humble, and we’ll look at the things we messed up and we’ve got to fix.”
Mandatory Credit: Bill Streicher-Imagn Images
