Eagles’ Nick Sirianni now is 4-0 against Rams ‘genius’ Sean McVay after a 19-point comeback win
Big Jordan Davis blocked a 44-yard field-goal attempt and returned it 61 yards as Sirianni's squad beat McVay, the darling of NFL GMs and owners.
If you fired every NFL coach on the same day, the coach most likely to be hired the next day probably is Sean McVay. With all due respect to Andy Reid, who’s 67, and Kyle Shanahan, who can’t win the big one, McVay — a frenetic offensive innovator with impeccable hair and an affinity for chunkier soups — remains the darling of NFL general managers and owners.
You know who wouldn’t be in the top five?
Which makes it all the more delicious that Sirianni now has beaten McVay in all four of their meetings. That includes three of the Eagles’ last 14 games: On the road last season, in Philly in the NFC divisional playoff game, and now, incredibly, unbelievably, at Lincoln Financial Field in perhaps the craziest game in the stadium’s 22-year history.
Jordan Davis — a 6-foot-6, 336-pound defensive tackle who lost 26 pounds in the offseason — blocked a 44-yard field-goal attempt as time expired. Then he picked it up and ran 61 yards for a touchdown. This time last year, Jordan probably couldn’t have run 61 yards, period.
At the time, the Eagles led by a point. They won, 33-26, in one of those games that about 1 million folks will claim to have been among the nearly 70,000 who actually attended the game.
It was the second blocked field goal attempt of the fourth quarter. A little more than eight minutes earlier, Jalen Carter, Davis’ fellow defensive tackle, fellow first-round pick, and fellow Georgia Bulldog, blocked a 36-yard try.
And that’s how Sirianni got to 4-0 against McVay.
“Four-and-oh? Really?” asked left tackle Jordan Mailata. “I’d wear that on my sleeve. That guy’s a [expletive] genius!”
“I’ve not been shy about me thinking Sean’s one of the best coaches in the NFL,” Sirianni. If McVay is one of the best, then what does that make Sirianni?
He grinned and said, “You guys make that decision.”
The Eagles moved to 3-0 this season and Sirianni’s winning percentage moved to .718 on Sunday in his 71st regular-season game, the fourth-best winning percentage in NFL history. Now 2-1 this season, McVay’s winning percentage fell to .607 in 135 games, tied for 34th among coaches with at least 71 games. Sirianni’s playoff winning percentage is .667 in nine games, with two conference championships and a Super Bowl win last February. McVay’s playoff winning percentage is .615 in 13 games, with two conference titles and a Super Bowl win.
Granted, two blocked field goals aren’t the sorts of plays on which to best judge head coaches’ abilities.
However, when you consider that Sirianni’s team overcame a 19-point third-quarter deficit that probably should have been even greater — now, that’s a fair barometer. Resilience is a product of culture, and Sirianni’s culture in the past calendar year is unmatched.
» READ MORE: The good, bad, and ugly from the Eagles-Rams broadcast
The culture seemed absent early. For the first time in months, the Eagles took the field unprepared to play a game. After the first possession, they got booed on the next four possessions. They took a knee and then got booed into the locker room.
“We were ready to play,” Sirianni insisted. “It just didn’t work.”
It didn’t work because the Birds lost right tackle Lane Johnson, the best player of the franchise’s Golden Era, on the first drive of the game, on the Tush Push touchdown run that gave the Eagles a 7-0 lead. He suffered a stinger, but told me after the game that he would surely play Sunday at Tampa Bay.
Since 2016, without Johnson, the Eagles were 12-23. Now, they’re 13-23. He was missed.
Less than 31 minutes into the game, Hurts had been sacked three times. He lost the third one. Johnson’s replacement, Matt Pryor, was drowning. He gave up that third sack, a strip-sack turnover, on the Eagles’ first possession of the second half.
Fred Johnson replaced him, and made a huge difference. The Eagles scored three TDs after his insertion, including the winner from Hurts to DeVonta Smith.
“That changed everything,” Hurts said of Johnson’s insertion.
The reality remains:
Pryor was neither prepared to be Lane Johnson’s understudy, nor was he as capable as Fred Johnson. Both are big coaching mistakes in judgment and execution, though they eventually got it right.
It was the biggest mistake Sirianni made Sunday.
» READ MORE: Grading the Eagles' 33-26 win over the Rams
It was the third time Davis and/or Carter showed up in the fourth quarter.
Less than a minute into the fourth quarter, on fourth-and-1 at the Eagles’ 46, Carter burst through the line and combined with Davis and Moro Ojomo to stop Kyren Williams for a 1-yard loss and a turnover on downs.
Davis squelched the Rams’ next drive when he sprinted 40 yards and ran down Stafford at the sideline for a third-down sack that forced a punt.
Despite the backgrounds of the two head coaches, Sunday’s affair was not an offensive clinic. Defense and special teams will feature in the memories of this unlikely, unbelievable win.
But you know what? Even if the head coach’s pedigree is as an offensive mind, like Sirianni, he’s still responsible for everything that happens on the field.
And, for the fourth time in a row, Nick Sirianni proved to be better than Sean McVay.