Defensive woes, Nick Sirianni’s job security, and more highlights from David Murphy’s Eagles AMA

Inquirer’s sports columnist David Murphy took to Reddit on Tuesday to answer questions about the struggling Eagles ahead of Monday’s playoff game vs. the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. You can check out the full thread on Reddit, but here are some of the highlights ...

David Murphy: I think the defense is much simpler to explain than the offense. Darius Slay hasn’t been there for the last five games. The linebackers and safeties were already a weakness going back to that Bills game. Take away your best cover cornerback and have nobody to replace him with? Straw that breaks the defense’s back. There are other issues obviously. But they just don’t have the talent right now and I think a lot of the coaching snafus are a result of trying to compensate for it. I mean, where is the talent on this team? Everyone oversold it from the jump. Jalen Carter is great. Haason Reddick is a good pass rusher but has always been one dimensional, which is why he was available for the contract he got. Otherwise, who do they actually have on this unit that makes people think they are underperforming their talent?

The “losing the locker room” construction has always been cart-before-horse stuff to me. Losing loses the locker room. Every locker room that loses six straight is a bad locker room. I think if Nick Sirianni beats the Bucs and Cowboys/Lions, he’ll have the locker room as firmly as he did before. Until then, yeah, he’s definitely at a point where players are starting to lose faith in his ability to stop losing.

» READ MORE: Actions speak louder: Eagles players are showing they’ve lost confidence in Nick Sirianni

David Murphy: Astounding is a word I’ve used on a ton over the last couple of weeks. Stunning. Inexplicable. Unprecedented. Again, I legit haven’t seen a team make this kind of u turn since those ‘94 Eagles. I’m sure it’s happened elsewhere in the NFL. I’ve just never watched it up close. Heck, the Bucs lost six in a row this season or six out of seven or something like that. So I really don’t think I can project how things are gonna go.

If they lose to the Bucs, I think you have to clean house from Sirianni on down. Whether or not it’s deserved, it never works to bring a coach back on a contingency or probationary basis. You just end up firing him at the first whiff of trouble and wasting an entire season. If they beat the Bucs and put up a fight in the divisional round, Sirianni may win himself enough political capital to return, but both coordinators should go. Will they? A lot depends on the Jalen Hurts-Brian Johnson relationship.

» READ MORE: Eagles’ Nick Sirianni sticking with play-callers Brian Johnson and Matt Patricia heading into the NFL playoffs

David Murphy: Let’s be honest. The blitz is almost always going to be on the quarterback. To identify it. To protect against it. To adapt the play call to it. And then, ultimately, to read and react before it gets there. Hurts has to be better. Again, going back to an earlier question, I think people have pulled far more punches with regard to Hurts than Sirianni.

» READ MORE: Bucs’ Todd Bowles may be a nightmare matchup for Nick Sirianni and Brian Johnson

David Murphy: My sense is that he is completely lost. No answers. The worst thing he could have done is fire the defensive coordinator when he did. Total panic move. If you fire that bullet, it better work, because if it doesn’t, you don’t really have another one in the chamber.

As for the fandom, I don’t think these coaches think that way. They are totally programmed to move from one opponent to the next. Their entire existence is breaking down tape of the next opponent and scheming up ways to beat them play by play, situation by situation. Nothing exists outside of the building.

David Murphy: I’ve actually always been a Patricia guy, from a defensive coordinator perspective. I was always impressed with the Patriots’ defenses when he was in New England. Right up until the ‘17 Super Bowl of course. That said, I think Patricia was fooling himself if he thought he could come in here without his top cornerback and with a disgruntled top edge rusher and reinvent the thing on the fly. I think they wanted Fangio last year and they’ve never really disguised that.

Frankly the way they handled the Gannon departure and Fangio stuff kinda set them up for the maximum chance of dysfunction. Which maybe shouldn’t be a surprise because if you look at the totality of the Eagles under Howie Roseman it is mostly periods of dysfunction interupted by flashes of brilliance. Kinda interesting actually.

Staff writer Gabriela Carroll contributed to this story.