The Eagles need Nick Sirianni to be as cool as Jalen Hurts in this big Cowboys matchup
The hot-blooded head coach sometimes goes a little too far in trying to fire up his team. His quarterback is a good model for keeping his cool.
Watch Nick Sirianni on the sideline during an Eagles game, and after a while, it feels like you’re taking in a one-man tragicomic play — a little Arthur Miller for the pathos, a little David Mamet for the hot-bloodedness, a little Aaron Sorkin for all the walking and talking.
He might snap at an official, like he did during last season’s playoff victory over the Giants. (“I know what the [expletive] I’m doing.”) He might scream across the field at an opposing coach, as he did to the Jets’ Robert Saleh during a preseason game after a late hit on Jalen Hurts. (“Saleh, what the [expletive]?”) He might chest-bump the strength coach or ham it up for the cameras or sprint toward the end zone to get closer to a post-touchdown celebration.
There’s one such moment, though, that stands out for its symbolism and significance to the Eagles. It happened during Super Bowl LVII, late in the first half.
The replay officials were reviewing an apparent 35-yard catch by DeVonta Smith, and Sirianni and Hurts were standing next to each other. Believing the officials would uphold the ruling, Sirianni raised his left arm and waved toward the Chiefs’ defensive players, as if to coax them to the new line of scrimmage. Hurts grabbed Sirianni’s arm and pulled it downward, and he was right to. The officials ruled that the pass was incomplete.
Watch the Eagles long enough, and you’ll see that dynamic — the manner in which their head coach and their starting quarterback contrast and complement each other — manifest itself. There’s a decent chance you’ll see it Sunday afternoon, when the Eagles (7-1) play their most important game of the season so far, against the Cowboys (5-2). Sirianni seems to have an electric cable crackling through his body. Hurts seems to help keep him, and the entire team, grounded.
“Nick Sirianni’s passion, I feel, elevates our play,” tight end Dallas Goedert said. “Me personally, I love it. A lot of the time, you see me standing there yelling at the refs with him or yelling at other players with him. I get fired up from what he does, but obviously Jalen’s not the same way. He’s more of a steadfast guy.”
It is a fascinating dynamic, because the 25-year-old quarterback tends to exhibit more self-control and less outward emotion than the 42-year-old head coach. That’s not to say that the Eagles are or have been an undisciplined team under Sirianni. Generally, they aren’t and haven’t been.
This season, for instance, they’ve committed the third-fewest penalties in the NFL. The cliché that a team takes on the personality of its head coach goes only so far with the Eagles. Whatever Sirianni says or does from Monday through Saturday to keep his team sharp, it tends to work, and his players do appreciate his authenticity.
“He’s just him,” defensive tackle Fletcher Cox said. “He’s our coach, and no matter what happens, we’ve got his back. Everybody in this locker room loves playing for him. They all talk about what a good coach he is.”
Yes, Sirianni is a good coach, but he’s not a perfect coach. He has had the benefit over the last two seasons of a roster full of smart, talented players who can cash most of the checks that he writes with his antics and outspokenness.
Most of the checks. The Eagles were fortunate to escape Indianapolis last season with a 17-16 victory over an inferior Colts team, and Sirianni allowed his emotions to overwhelm him that day. The Colts had just fired one of his mentors, Frank Reich, and he screamed at some of their fans after the game. That sort of behavior might make it a little more difficult for him to admonish a player who displays a similar lack of restraint — a player such as running game Kenneth Gainwell, for example, who spent halftime of last week’s game against Washington responding to critics on Instagram.
Sirianni made his silliest mistake in this regard in 2021, ahead of the Eagles’ Week 3 game against the Cowboys. He wore a “BEAT DALLAS” T-shirt, a sure sign that he was pandering to the fan base and paying too much attention to the hype and (benign) hatred around here of all things Dallas. It was a rah-rah, high school-Harry gimmick, a look-at-me kind of move, one made all the more misguided after the Cowboys destroyed the Eagles at AT&T Stadium, 41-21.
Last year, during a team meeting, Sirianni apologized to his players for wearing the shirt, then took it out and threw it to the floor. The episode, he said Wednesday, taught him a valuable lesson.
“We have to treat every day the same,” Sirianni said. “You can’t get more up for one game than you would the next game. … If I said to the fans and to you as the media, ‘It’s Cowboys week. We’re going to ramp it up,’ well, what the hell were we doing the last couple of weeks?”
Watch Hurts long enough, and even though he considers most questions from us media types to be tiresome, even though his disdain for answering those questions comes through loud and clear, he at least keeps that even keel from week to week, even in the teeth of a game.
“I just try to set the right example and do my job to the best of my abilities,” he said. “You hope you encourage people to come along and to follow you. All of it’s done to try to set the right example. Everybody has their different way of doing that.”
His head coach certainly does. Nick Sirianni has already learned the hard way — against the Dallas Cowboys — that sometimes it’s better to be discreet than to be demonstrative, that there’s a certain level of maturity that an NFL coach has to maintain. Sunday isn’t the time for another teachable moment.