ARLINGTON, Texas — Between one embarrassing loss to an NFC contender and another, Nick Sirianni delivered the kind of syrupy soliloquy that a Pop Warner coach might. This was Wednesday afternoon. The Dallas Cowboys hadn’t yet destroyed the Eagles, 33-13, and the 49ers already had demolished them, 42-19. Sure, Sirianni made it clear that he would keep his messaging and motivational speeches to his players in-house, at least until someone from the organization could leak them to the appropriate mouthpiece. Still, it was striking to hear him speak of learning life lessons, of falling to the ground only to get up again, as if professional coaches and players were little kids and not men paid to perform.

“Being able to manage yourself when you’re up and then really being able to pick yourself up off the ground when you’re down — that’s another reason I love this game so much,” he had said. “It just teaches you that. Shoot, we’ve all been here before. Everybody in our room has been here before where you have to pick yourself back up. Nobody’s going to care if you’re down except for the guys in this room, and we pick ourselves back up and go again.”

Not Sunday night here at AT&T Stadium. Not against a Cowboys team that could get away with a ragged second half, still keep the Eagles at arm’s length, and take over first place in the NFC East. For the second straight week, against a second team that they’ll likely have to beat to get back to the Super Bowl, the Eagles went down and stayed down. They’re 10-3 and somehow feel so far away from who they were supposed to be.

There’s a sense now that their record doesn’t matter. They could win next Monday night in Seattle against the Seahawks, and they could keep getting well over the season’s final three weeks, with two games against the awful New York Giants and one against the Arizona Cardinals, who are even worse. They could finish 14-3, the same mark as last season’s, but it won’t be the same because of the apprehension and doubts that these two losses have inspired.

» READ MORE: Eagles-Cowboys analysis: Mistake-prone Birds get blasted in Dallas and lose grip on NFC’s top seed

Whether the mistakes are physical or mental or strategic, whether it’s Jalen Hurts and A.J. Brown fumbling to end promising drives or Sean Desai’s defense showing it’s soft all over, the sloppiness and incompetence have to stop. And the stopping has to start with Sirianni. These final four games give him some time and room to experiment, and something new and different wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, just to put everyone on notice. Maybe he takes back the play-calling duties from Brian Johnson. Maybe there’s a shift that Desai can try. Something. The Eagles need something.

It goes too far to say that this is the first or most pivotal crisis point of Sirianni’s tenure. Remember: He was a rookie head coach with a 2-5 team in 2021. It looked then like he was out of his league, and he and the Eagles managed to pull themselves back from that brink and wriggle their way into the playoffs. But remember, too, what that wriggling required: Sirianni, his staff, and the front office had to recognize that the Eagles needed to change the entire focus and approach of their offense. That Hurts wasn’t ready yet to win games for them with his arm alone. That relying on their offensive line and running game was the only way they might salvage that season.

They did salvage it — and, maybe, Sirianni’s job. Then they improved their personnel, and their quarterback improved himself, and just like that, they were 30 minutes from a championship, the cream of their conference, the prime target for just about every team on their schedule. The sternest challenge for a coach in that situation is to keep his team sharp, to maintain what Hurts so often calls “the standard.”

Except for two weeks now, the Eagles haven’t come close to it. It would be one thing if they had gone toe-to-toe with the Cowboys and 49ers, if just one of these losses had been a coin flip. Nope. They’ve both been beatdowns, both been defined by the same problems: an offense that lacks creativity and can’t get in the end zone until it’s too late, a defense that leaves too many receivers open, gives up too many first downs on third downs, and allows too many ballcarriers to break too many tackles. Poor coaching, personnel shortcomings, the grind of facing an opponent’s best effort every week — these are all factors, of course. But those factors didn’t prevent the Eagles from winning 10 of their first 11 games, and they shouldn’t be enough to prevent a turnaround now.

“Now we’re going through some adversity,” Sirianni said. “Adversity can do a couple of things to you. It can break you, or it can make you way better. I know that everybody in that locker room has been through [crap] in their lives and has made it to this point. They’ve made it to this point because of the [crap] they’ve been through. And so that adversity has [gotten] a lot of us in that locker room where we are today. We’ve got to remember that. We’ve got to internalize that.”

There should be plenty of material here for Sirianni to use to snap the Eagles back to attention. The 49ers trash-talked them for 11 months, then backed it up. Ahead by three scores with less than six minutes left, the Cowboys were throwing deep, daring the Eagles’ defensive backs to cover them after the outcome was already in hand. Two big games, two big letdowns. A moment like this is when a head coach earns his money, and Nick Sirianni has a hell of a lot of work ahead.