Nick Sirianni is standing by the Eagles’ coaches. He should understand the risk he’s running.

It may well turn out that Nick Sirianni used his media availabilities this week to head-fake everyone — the press, the public, the Seattle Seahawks, maybe even a few of his own players — but for now, let’s take him at his word.

The Eagles lost to the 49ers and the Cowboys in succession, by an aggregate score of 75-32. They lost big to the two teams that are challenging them, and might have already surpassed them, for supremacy in the NFC.

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Against San Francisco, they surrendered touchdowns on six consecutive possessions, getting both outschemed by Kyle Shanahan and overrun by Deebo Samuel and Christian McCaffrey. Against Dallas, they did not score an offensive touchdown, which ought to be impossible given the amount of talent they have among their quarterback, their receivers, their runners, and their blockers. Jalen Hurts targeted just three players all night — A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert — and Hurts, Brown, and Smith all lost fumbles.

There was no real either-or way to explain those two losses. If you’re asking, “Were the Eagles outplayed or outcoached?” the only correct answer is “Yes.” But Sirianni, based on what he said and showed publicly, seems to have taken a zero-sum approach to solving the Eagles’ problems.

Though he acknowledged that the team could throw the ball more to D’Andre Swift out of the backfield, he made it clear that he would not change any of his coordinators’ or assistant coaches’ responsibilities ahead of Monday night’s game in Seattle. Brian Johnson would continue calling plays, and Sean Desai’s defense would remain Sean Desai’s defense.

“I feel good with the people that we have in this building,” Sirianni said. “We’re 10-3. We’re in control of our own destiny, and we’re going to keep rolling and finding answers with the people that we have.”

Instead, the adjustments that Sirianni ended up making affected his players first and foremost. After scheduling a walk-through for Thursday afternoon, he decided to hold a full practice that day.

“We need to go out there and work on our fundamentals,” he said. And Hurts, who has fumbled at least once in each of his last seven games, did just that: The coaches put him through a drill in which he practiced falling to the ground, as if he were being tackled, and holding on to the ball. The implication of these measures was obvious: We keep making mistakes that we shouldn’t be making, and if we clean up our play, we’ll get back to winning games.

“We’ve got a really special offense,” Goedert said. “We’ve got really good players on the outside, really good players on the inside, a special quarterback. So we just need to make sure we continue to play to our strengths, find something that the defense gives us, throw a few twists in there. But offensively, if you take out the turnovers and plays where we hurt ourselves, I feel like we moved the ball really effectively. We just need to buy in and lock into that process.”

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What Sirianni has painted as a straightforward fix, though, might not be so easy, and it might have repercussions that he didn’t intend or foresee.

Within minutes of that Cowboys loss, JAKIB Media’s Derrick Gunn, as credible as anyone who has covered the Eagles over the last quarter-century, began getting text messages from players who told him, “We are very predictable. … Look at our pass routes compared to the Cowboys’ pass routes. Our pass routes take too long to develop. Dallas gets their [stuff] out real quick.”

Those texts suggest that not everyone believes that getting back to the basics and brushing up on fundamentals will cure all that ails this team. They suggest, in fact, that the Eagles’ game plans, schemes, and play-calling are at least part of the problem, and by putting the onus on the players to be sharper, by apparently implementing no changes within his staff, Sirianni risks sending the kind of message that can court a backlash both inside a locker room and inside an owner’s suite: The coaches coached good. The players played bad. His two most recent predecessors, Doug Pederson and Chip Kelly, tried that same tack, and as you might remember, it led to some minor upheaval.

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Again, it’s possible that Sirianni doesn’t want to reveal all the tweaks and adjustments he has made or might make if the Eagles’ performance doesn’t improve. It wouldn’t be the most surprising bit of news if, three or four weeks from now, word leaked out of the NovaCare Complex, Oh, by the way, Nick took over play-calling duties a while ago.

But if he is standing as firmly behind Johnson, Desai, and the rest of his staff as he says, then he’d better hope that he turns out to be right, that the Eagles just have to play better, that their coaching hasn’t been and won’t be the issue. Because if he’s wrong, he needs to understand: Jeffrey Lurie has a track record here, and he tends not to blame the talent.