Nick Sirianni’s introduction seems like a lifetime ago.
Standing behind a lectern onstage in front of an empty auditorium, he waited through a 16-minute opening statement by owner Jeffrey Lurie before stammering through a bumbling spiel that opened with mispronunciations of the names of Lurie and team president Don Smolenski (“Slowinski,” in this case).
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Staring into a Zoom camera, he fumbled the answers to easy questions about Carson Wentz’s status on the roster. He looked uncomfortable and sounded unconvincing. One week into the job, he became a punchline. It looked like he had no idea what he was doing.
Two years later to the day, Sirianni’s Eagles booked their trip to the Super Bowl with a 31-7 win in the NFC Championship Game. That capped off a season in which the team went 14-1 with its starting quarterback, earned the conference’s No. 1 seed and outscored opponents 69-14 in two playoff wins.
Turns out the joke was on us.
No team over the past two seasons has outpaced its preseason projected win totals more than Philadelphia. Through rock-paper-scissors scouting, flower analogies and accusations of being on a “free ride,” Sirianni has reworked his offense, empowered his staff and fostered a culture that’s now the envy of the league. He’s like a locker room savant.
He also happened to lay out the secrets to his success during that first news conference, if only we had bothered to listen.
“Part of, of my core values is accountability. Right? We have to set the standard early, we have to set our standard early of what’s acceptable and unacceptable on the field, and what we, and what we need to do to get better. Right? And so, that’s my job. Right? That’s my job to set that standard with, with the coaches. And then when you really are cooking, the players are holding the players accountable and everybody’s holding each other accountable.”
The Philadelphia team Sirianni inherited was coming off a 4-11-1 rock-bottom season that sent Doug Pederson into unemployment three years after delivering the city’s first Super Bowl title. Weeks after Sirianni virtually met the media, Wentz was traded to the Indianapolis Colts. By the time Sirianni met with a roster of over-the-hill veterans and unproven youngsters for the first time at organized team activities, he and his very young staff had a lot of work to do.
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Yet one of his first orders of business was to own up to his public embarrassment.
“He won me over when he first got here,” defensive end Brandon Graham, the team’s longest-tenured player, said last week. “That first press conference he had that he … said all the wrong things, when y’all got on him. I just felt like he came in here and gave us his honest answer about how he felt about it — and he was pissed about it. And I love that, because a lot of coaches wouldn’t admit to sometimes when the media get under their skin.”
“He showed it to us,” tight end Dallas Goedert told The Athletic. “He just let us know he might make mistakes, he’s gonna embrace them and he’s gonna hold himself accountable, too.”
Accountability is one of Sirianni’s five core values, which you would know if you’ve ever heard him talk for more than 45 seconds. The other four are “connect, compete, fundamentals and football IQ.” The contradictory parts of speech are enough to make a copy editor twitch, but maybe that’s part of the magic.
Often, as he did during that initial team meeting, Sirianni shines the spotlight on himself. He did the same thing this season in the lead-up to the first game with the Cowboys, chastising himself for wearing a “Beat Dallas” T-shirt the year prior in a stunt that backfired spectacularly.
That self-criticism earns him the grace to call out others, which he does in every team meeting. When a play is shown, be it from practice or a game, the person at fault for its lack of success is identified on the screen. Sometimes it’s a player who missed an assignment. Sometimes it’s a coach who failed to properly teach a technique. No one is immune.
“I think it’s a way to get people’s egos out of the way,” Lane Johnson told The Athletic earlier this season. “It doesn’t matter who the player is, just hold them accountable. I think it makes a team better in the long run, that approach.”
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Honest self-evaluation is also what led to one of Sirianni’s most important big-picture decisions, handing off game day play calling to offensive coordinator Shane Steichen midway through the 2021 season. The combination of calling plays for the first time and trying to manage in-game decisions while checking in with the defense was overwhelming. He needed to do less.
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Not only did the Eagles’ offense improve — in large part by a coinciding decision to tailor its attack to maximize quarterback Jalen Hurts’ strengths — but so did Sirianni’s decision-making.
“Where a lot of problems happen in the NFL is from an ego standpoint,” Sirianni said last June. “I felt like I needed to make a change in the sense of how to free me up to be a better head coach, and I had a good assistant to call the plays, and so that’s what I went with.”
“When you build these connections, right, you end up, you’ll end up pushing a little bit harder for someone that you know and someone that you care for and someone that you love. And that’s what we want to try to develop. And I get to be a part of a team. All of us, everybody in this building, we’re a part of a team. I’m 39 years old, I’m a part of a team. That’s unbelievable.”
It sounds like hokum — and there’s a chicken-or-the-egg issue about whether having a tight locker room helps a team get better or vice versa — but almost to a man, Eagles players credit Sirianni’s emphasis on connection as the most important of his core tenets. He always lists it first intentionally.
“If you connect as a group, as a team, you can hold everyone accountable,” said wide receiver A.J. Brown. “I can’t hold Fletcher Cox accountable if I don’t hang out with Fletcher Cox. … I gotta connect with him. I gotta do stuff with him.”
“It’s not like this everywhere else in the NFL,” said defensive tackle Javon Hargrave.
In the lead-up to the NFC Championship Game, Sirianni told his team the story of one of his lowest moments, when he suffered a catastrophic leg injury in college that took him away from the team (it’s why his game day attire always includes stickers with the numbers of the team’s injured players). But it’s not as if bowling nights and book clubs turned a flailing franchise into a Super Bowl favorite in two years.
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Respect is earned on the field, and what players respect more than anything — “The first part of connecting,” Sirianni once said — is a coach they trust can make them better. Sirianni demands that his coaches stress perfecting the fundamentals. The former Division III receiver likes getting in the weeds, whether that’s nagging DeVonta Smith about eye discipline or teaching backup tight end Jack Stoll a trick to create space at the top of his route.
Last week’s accusation by New York Giants safety Julian Love that Sirianni is “along for the ride” with an uber-talented roster neglects the degree to which players have been maximized. Hurts entered the MVP discussion in his second year in the offense. The team’s top four skill-position players all had career years; the same goes for nearly every player on defense. Older veterans like Johnson and Jason Kelce have benefitted from Sirianni’s embrace of a lighter training camp and late-season practice schedule backed by the team’s sports science department.
Everything, Sirianni said, is in service of “team, team, team, team.” And for someone who grew up the son of a football and track coach who invited his teams over for dinner every Thursday night, the lines between family and team have always been blurred.
“His atmosphere or culture that he’s built within this building is a really big reason why the coaches have flourished, why the players have flourished,” said Kelce. “That’s what a head coach’s main goal is. Whether he’s calling the plays … or managing the game, his No. 1 job is to facilitate a team, an organization that’s focused on improving, that’s focused on working, that comes in the building with energy, that’s motivated to get better.
“These things far outweigh what play we call on third down, and I think Nick does a phenomenal job of that and I think he deserves all the credit in the world for that.”
Sirianni’s secret sauce, if he has one, is that he’s always himself. Authenticity goes a long way.
“Once we created that relationship, coach to player, player to coach, you understand each other and you respect each other,” said Cox. “You can’t help but go out and play for him.”
When Sirianni waited in the freezing January parking lot for an hour after the team arrived home following its playoff loss in Tampa because rookie cornerback Zech McPhearson’s car broke down, that’s what he would have done for a teammate at Mount Union. When he mugged for the camera during the team’s playoff rout of the Giants in the divisional round a year later, that’s the same side that would talk trash at his brothers in pickup basketball.
“If I’m truly trying to build relationships with people and truly living by our core values of connect, then I can’t be somebody that I’m not,” he said. “And I don’t apologize for having fun. This is too hard not to have fun.”
“The first part of being smart is knowing what to do. We’re going, we’re gonna know, we’re gonna have systems in place that are easier to learn, all right? Complicated to the defense or offense that they’re going against, or the special teams group they’re going against, but easy for us to learn. Because when we can put that, ‘cuz we, when we can learn our system and we can get good at our system, then our talent can take over. Less thinking equals talent takeover.”
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The opening drive of the NFC Championship Game: Hurts and the offense face a fourth-and-3 from the 49ers’ 35-yard line. Ben Baldwin’s fourth-down bot pegged the decision as a “strong” go-for-it situation, assigning the Eagles a 56 percent win probability by going for it, a 53 percent win probability by kicking a field goal and a 52 percent win probability by punting.
Even against the league’s No. 1 defense, Sirianni kept his offense on the field. His team had the best fourth-down offense in the NFL, the only one that ranked in the top five in both fourth-down attempts and fourth-down success rate. (Only those who hadn’t been paying close attention were caught by surprise when he later successfully converted on fourth-and-1 from his own 34.)
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Hurts scrambled to his left and lofted a ball to where only Smith could catch it. The second-year wide receiver leaped into the air and hauled it in as he hit the ground, then popped up and sprinted to the huddle while making a hand signal to his teammates. The offense lined up and Hurts snapped the ball before Kyle Shanahan and the 49ers dared challenge Smith’s catch, which, replay showed, was bobbled on the ground.
It was a heads-up play by Smith, but also one borne out of repetition.
“He didn’t catch it? Well then that was even better of a play,” Sirianni said after the game. “We talk a lot (about) situational football is not just third down and red zone and two-minute. It’s not just those things — it’s the situations that happen within the game. That particular thing is the situation that happens within the game. DeVonta has done that. In fact, the very first game we had here against Atlanta (in 2021), Zach Ertz did the same thing.”
Because he no longer calls plays for the league’s No. 2 offense (by expected points added per drive, postseason included), Sirianni rarely gets credit, which instead goes to Steichen’s play calling or offensive line coach/run game coordinator Jeff Stoutland’s design. But Sirianni is the one spearheading the weekly game plan, creating the menu from which Steichen will order.
Despite his team outperforming its projected win total by more than any other team in the league this season (4 1/2 games, one year after tying for the league lead with 2 1/2 wins over preseason expectation), he was not named one of the three finalists for Coach of the Year. Knowing his competitive nature, Sirianni is liable to twist that slight into motivation.
Sirianni acknowledged last week that he took it personally when Andy Reid decided not to retain the then-receivers coach after Reid was hired as Chiefs head coach in 2013. Underestimate him at your peril.
Reflecting now on Sirianni’s first news conference is a lesson in leniency.
The Eagles were the only team to interview him and did so late enough in their process that Sirianni had to abandon his family vacation. His introduction made it look like Lurie and general manager Howie Roseman were playing the part of Randolph and Mortimer Duke, proving they could turn any schlub into a successful head coach.
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It turns out, even then, Lurie understood Sirianni’s appeal.
“I think it’s really valuable to have somebody that innately and genuinely cares about who they work with, the players that play for them and with them, the other coaches, the staff,” Lurie said via Zoom that January day. “For me, Nick epitomizes that. … I think he’ll be himself and at times it will be with an edge. I think that’s great. I encourage that.”
It took time for Philadelphia to fully embrace Sirianni’s process. He was mocked for vetting draft prospects’ competitive nature over Zoom by challenging them to play rock, paper, scissors, but that draft class produced two bedrock players in Smith and Landon Dickerson, key rotational pieces Milton Williams and Kenneth Gainwell, and special teams standout McPhearson.
He was teased for telling his 2-5 football team it was planting seeds for flowers to grow. Including the playoffs, the Eagles are 23-7 since.
He heard the laughter and told us all the same thing he barked at a sideline referee during the divisional-round rout of the Giants: “I know what the f— I’m doing.”
(Illustration: Sam Richardson / The Athletic; Photo: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)