Philadelphia Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni’s job security has been called into question after his team lost six of their final seven games this season, including a 32-9 blowout against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Monday night’s Wild Card Round matchup.
But center Jason Kelce and veteran defensive tackle Fletcher Cox came to his defense on Wednesday.
“I love Nick,” Kelce told reporters. “I think Nick’s a great coach, I really do. I think he’s a great head coach. Obviously, nobody was good enough this year. I wasn’t. None of the players. None of the coaches were good enough down the stretch. That’s the reality of this business, when you’re that bad it’s a collective thing. But I’ll always have faith in Nick Sirianni.”
Cox offered an even more spirited defense of Sirianni:
“This man, he’s a winner. He’s a winning head coach. Did we have some bumps this year? Yeah, but every team, every organization, everybody goes through it. But we don’t look at firing the man who, you know, obviously has won 10-plus games two years in a row. That’s taken this organization to three playoff appearances, three years in a row. You know, that’s respect. Coach is a good leader for this team. He does a really good job.”
Cox made the two strongest arguments for keeping Sirianni: He has a strong résumé—he’s 34-17 as a head coach, has never missed the playoffs and led the team to a Super Bowl berth last year—and he hasn’t seemed to lose the locker room despite the team’s impotent end to the season.
But Sirianni also has to own the team’s absolute collapse following a 10-1 start. His replacements last offseason for former offensive coordinator Shane Steichen and defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon—who took head-coaching gigs with the Indianapolis Colts and Arizona Cardinals, respectively—were Brian Johnson and Sean Desai.
Neither panned out.
Offensively under Johnson, the Eagles became incredibly predictable by the end of the season, struggled to deal with blitzes, often started games sluggishly and saw quarterback Jalen Hurts regress significantly after being an MVP candidate in 2022.
He finished with 21 turnovers after only registering eight last season.
Sirianni was hired as an offensive guru, but it has to be a concern that he, Johnson and Hurts seemed to run out of answers by the end of the season, scoring fewer than 20 points in five of the last seven games they played.
The defensive side of the ball was an even bigger disaster, to the point that Sirianni demoted Desai midseason, instead handing play-calling duties to Matt Patricia. If anything, the defense only got worse from there—under Patricia, the defense gave up 27 or more points in four of the five games where he called the plays.
The concern in Philadelphia is that the real architects of Philly’s Super Bowl run in 2022 were the since-departed Steichen and Gannon and that Sirianni was unable to make the needed adjustments to salvage the season.
His defenders might point out that it was hard to envision the cornerback pair of Darius Slay Jr. and James Bradberry taking such a major step back from last season, or that the team didn’t enter the season with quality options at linebacker or safety. It’s also possible that Hurts played much of the year hurt, which perhaps contributed to his regression.
But it’s also hard to remember a presumed contender collapsing down the stretch more spectacularly than these Eagles. Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffery Lurie and executive vice president and general manager Howie Roseman are left to decide if Sirianni is capable of turning things around in 2024, or if the late-season struggles were indicative of far deeper issues that require a change of leadership.
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