Jonathan Gannon silences reporters with a comment about a former Eagles quarterback

One apple from Nick Sirianni’s coaching tree has had a rough couple of weeks.

Arizona Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon left reporters silent Wednesday with a response to a benign question about the health of his team.

The Cardinals (2-4), who have lost four straight games and face the Green Bay Packers (3-1-1) Sunday, are dealing with a number of injuries. Quarterback Kyler Murray might not play again this week due to a foot injury, while wide receiver and Philly native Marvin Harrison Jr. remains in the concussion protocol.

A reporter asked Gannon a pretty tame question: How early did he learn to take the emotion out of coaching when his team was dealing with a lot of injuries?

“2007, when our quarterback went to jail,” Gannon said, offering no further explanation.

The silence in the room was only interrupted by a staffer ending the news conference with an awkward, “Coach, thank you.”

The quarterback Gannon was referring to was none other than Michael Vick, the former Eagles starter who left Fox Sports as an analyst this year to become the head football coach at Norfolk State.

In 2007, Gannon was a defensive quality control coach for the Atlanta Falcons — his first NFL job — when Vick and three other men were indicted for operating a dogfighting ring. Vick spent 19 months in prison after pleading guilty to dogfighting, and while it ended his tenure in Atlanta, he resurrected his career with the Eagles and a Pro Bowl nod in 2010.

Gannon explained none of that to reporters, of course. But he’s always run a bit on the intense side.

Last week, Gannon was fined $100,000 for hitting running back Emeri Demarcado following his inexplicable fumble at the goal line during the Cardinals’ Week 5 collapse against the lowly Tennessee Titans.

Gannon said he apologized to Demarcado and the team the following day.

“I woke up this morning and didn’t feel great about it, honestly,” Gannon told reporters.

Gannon is in the third season of a five-year deal he signed with the Cardinals in 2023, fresh off the Eagles’ Super Bowl loss against the Kansas City Chiefs. That exit didn’t even go smoothly — the Cardinals ended up swapping draft picks with the Eagles following a tampering violation.

Unless you’re a Flyers fan, Philly sports enthusiasts probably have limited interaction with ESPN+, which will soon be enveloped by the network’s big new direct-to-consumer app called … ESPN.

What Chaos! podcast hosts Pete Blackburn and DJ Bean appear to have uncovered an interesting problem for fans streaming NHL games on ESPN+. As they outlined in a recent episode, ESPN appears to be inserting ad breaks that are longer than the normal TV commercial stops, causing fans to lag behind the actual game.

“This eventually makes viewers’ feeds no longer live, and they don’t know that unless they manually check,” Bean said, an issue Blackburn said he tested an confirmed.

“My first reaction was, ‘DJ’s being dramatic, he’s making his problem everybody else’s problem,’” Blackburn said. “I checked to see where I was in my ESPN+ feed in relation to a live games. I was like three minutes, game minutes, behind where I should be in the live feed … It is absolutely happening.”

An ESPN spokesperson said the network was looking into addressing the problem, but it isn’t being caused by ESPN trying to insert more ads.

The lag time on some connected devices and TVs is being caused by the buffering necessary to ensure the game resumes where it left off and not skip ahead. That buffering also sometimes occurs between the commercials themselves, which can add up over the course of a full game.

The Flyers are scheduled to appear exclusively on ESPN+ and Hulu three times this season, beginning with their Dec. 18 matchup against the Buffalo Sabres.

ESPN+’s content has become part of the “Select” and “Unlimited” tiers on ESPN’s subscription streaming service. Despite that, the ESPN+ brand name will continue to exist for promotional purposes. A number of leagues have exclusive broadcast deals on the platform, including the NHL; UFC and La Liga, Spain’s top professional soccer league.