The Eagles’ problems are much bigger than Nick Sirianni. How can they not be after this?

TAMPA, Fla. — They told us everything we needed to know.

They showed us all we needed to see.

The discombobulation, the disarray, the disinterest: dysfunction as broad as it was deep. Would-be tacklers bouncing off ballcarriers like bad ideas, would-be pass defenders praying for drops, would-be timeouts burned in frenzied panic, a quarterback incapable of making a difference. This was the Eagles in their moment of truth.

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They swore they were going to show us who they really were. And boy, did they ever. Not just a bad team, but a fundamentally unserious one.

That’s a stunning thing to write. It’s an even more stunning thing to witness. In less than a calendar year, heck, in less than a couple of calendar months, the Eagles have gone from (arguably) the NFL’s best team to (inarguably) its least functional one. They have gone from finding an MVP franchise quarterback to finding themselves steamrolled by Baker Mayfield and the middling Bucs in the wild-card round of the playoffs.

Bucs 32, Eagles 9.

Yeah, this one spoke volumes. Actions always do. Forget all of those answers the Eagles spent the last month-and-a-half feeding us as their season rotted from within. You can’t say they were delusional because they never really seemed to totally believe the words that were coming out of their mouths. The wisest ones kept coming back to a three-word phrase.

We’ll find out.

This wasn’t just a playoff game. It was a vote of confidence, and the final tally was a landslide.

The Eagles abstained.

Unanimously.

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That’s a problem. A serious one. The questions about Nick Sirianni’s future are mostly irrelevant at this point. This was not a referendum on a head coach alone. It was a referendum on an organization. Any time a roster no-shows this completely, and checks out this swiftly, and shows this little ability — if not inclination — to overcome obstacles, the first place you must look is the roster itself. At the philosophy that governed its construction. At the environment in which it operates. At the people in charge of putting that all together.

Those are the places you must look.

Once you do, you’ll start to see similarities between the wreckage of this Eagles season and the ones that claimed the jobs of the last three head coaches. The Dream Team. The Chip Kelly team that needed a pep talk from Jeffrey Lurie in New England. Doug Pederson’s last couple of seasons. The vibes are the same. The issues are the same. The head-scratching dysfunction is the same.

You have to really think back to how those times felt in the moment, before Lurie and Howie Roseman backfilled our memories with narratives of who was really to blame. It is a difficult thing to do. The Eagles are masters at memory replacement. They are well aware that they work with a vulnerable population that desperately wants to believe in a better tomorrow.

2014 and 2015? That was all Kelly’s fault. Pay no attention to the people who thought he’d be a good fit in the NFL and took a victory lap after hiring him. He turned out to be a megalomaniac with the people skills of a prickly French chef. People skills! That’s what we want now.

2018, 2019, and 2020? Well, you see, Carson Wentz turned out to be a loser. Pay no attention to the people who traded up to draft him after traveling all the way to North Dakota to get a real sense of the man’s character. How were we to know?

2021? A building year, the year we learned Jalen Hurts was our franchise quarterback, even though we couldn’t stop thinking about trading him for Russell Wilson or Deshaun Watson.

2023? If our defense stinks, it’s Jonathan Gannon’s fault, because he left us after the Super Bowl. Which was also his fault, because he was there. Confused? Look over there, it’s Sean Desai!

The fact of the matter is, the Eagles’ way of doing business has always been more Machiavelli than Art Rooney. Their ethos has always been to look out for No. 1 and do it unapologetically, whether it means throwing a regular-season finale for a better draft pick or undermining an incumbent quarterback by drafting one in the second round or firing the coach who won the organization’s first Super Bowl after initially standing by him. All defensible decisions, mind you. Yet, reflective of a certain mindset.

There’s a danger there. Karma is the shorthand for it, but the cause-and-effect is more concrete than that. An organization that values ends and not means can easily end up with a critical mass of people who think likewise. And you can only have so many people looking out for No. 1 when adversity strikes, or no one looks out for anyone else.

Alshon Jeffery, Jay Ajayi, Darius Slay, Haason Reddick, A.J. Brown, Chauncey Gardner-Johnson — all landed with the Eagles because they felt undervalued elsewhere. The upside is tremendous. We saw it in 2017 and we saw it last season. But the downside can be just as extreme. It’s a tale as old as mercenaries.

Maybe that’s what you heard out of Lane Johnson on Monday. He saw what you saw. What Troy Aikman saw on the broadcast. It was worse than bad body language. It was a complete lack of desire — true, meaningful, scales-tipping desire, the kind of thing that wins the battle for the middle of the field.

“What do I tell my guys on the O-line?” Johnson said after Monday’s loss. “No matter what the [bleeping] scoreboard, no clapping your hands, no sulking after bad plays. You go up to the line of scrimmage like nothing [bleeping] happened. Like a robot. Yeah, I think that’s something that needs to be addressed as far as next season. You don’t want to give your opponents anything. They see that [stuff] on film, sulking, bad body language, all that stuff, you can’t give your opponents anything.”

Once upon a time, Johnson learned that lesson from guys like Jason Kelce and Jason Peters. Now, he is the one with an ownership stake. He is the one investing in human capital like Landon Dickerson and Cam Jurgens and Jordan Mailata. Why is the Eagles offensive line such a picture of stability? Look at the lineage, the tenure, the identity. You are drafted and developed to become the next piece of a well-defined order. You learn that things are done a certain way, and you continue to do them that way even when times get tough.

Look at the NFL’s great defenses and they all have that order. That lineage. No one coach can create it. You build it until it self-sustains. Look at the dominant units around the league and you’ll find a core group of defenders who were drafted and developed and indoctrinated into a specific style of play. The thing about patchwork is that it does the job until it rips at the seams. You build a defense that has no discernible heart and soul outside of a couple of guys at the end of their careers, you eventually get a defense that plays hollow, too.

That was the Eagles’ defense against the Bucs. Hollow. There was no toughness, no identity, no common cause. There was no Malcolm Jenkins, no Brian Dawkins, no Jeremiah Trotter, no Fred Warner or Patrick Queen or Kyle Hamilton or anybody who looks like the kind of guy who is somewhere in the middle of almost every upper-tier defense.

But this isn’t just about defense. The real danger is the detachment we are seeing from the most important guy on the offensive side of the ball. Hurts did not play well against the Bucs, which is getting to be a trend. Forget about his difficulties against the blitz, or attacking the middle of the field. The guy had one rushing attempt for 5 yards. Then, after the game, he spoke of the need for everyone to take ownership for the loss, while taking almost none himself.

The day began with an ESPN report that cited a source close to Hurts saying he wasn’t happy with the offensive scheme. It ended with him passing on an opportunity to say he wanted to see Sirianni return as head coach.

Reporter: “Do you want Nick back?”

Hurts: “I didn’t know he was going anywhere.”

Reporter: “There are a lot of questions about his future.”

Hurts: “I didn’t know that.”

Reporter: “What’s your confidence level in Nick to fix this?”

Hurts: “I have a ton of confidence in everyone in this building.”

Compare that to the way Dak Prescott handled similar questions about coach Mike McCarthy in the wake of the Cowboys’ blowout loss to the Packers. After saying, “I sucked” and talking at length about that suckiness, Prescott had this to say about a potential coaching change:

“He’s been amazing. I don’t know how they can be, but I understand the business. In that case, it should be about me as well. I’ve had the season that I’ve had because of him. This team has had the success that they’ve had because of him. I understand it’s about winning the Super Bowl. That’s the standard of this league and damn sure the standard of this place. I get it but add me to the list in that case.”

Right now, Sirianni’s strongest defense is the disconcerting similarities between his straits and those previously endured by Kelly and Pederson after their breakout seasons. Seven years ago, it ended with Lurie firing Kelly as his veterans tuned him out and he tuned out his bosses. Four years ago, it ended with Lurie reversing course and firing Pederson after his quarterback self-immolated and nearly took the franchise down with it. Now, one year after coming up one possession short against Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid on football’s ultimate stage, we’re supposed to believe that Sirianni and Sirianni alone has lost complete and sudden control of his team.

He is not blameless. Let’s be clear about that. None of this is an argument that Sirianni should remain. A head coach’s first responsibility is to be the adult in the room. Sirianni has spent much of the last year walking a high-wire act between infectious energy and buffoonery. There is a reason few other coaches act that way. There are moments when you need people to take you seriously. And some of those people are the most serious people out there. Fellow coaches. Referees. Bosses.

Quarterbacks.

Regardless of Sirianni’s fate, the bigger issue is the context in which all of this was allowed to happen. The Eagles have much bigger problems than figuring out whether the guy who led them to last year’s Super Bowl should lead them out of this year’s abyss. For the third straight coaching cycle, early promise has given way to roots-deep dysfunction.

Whether or not Sirianni is gone, the important questions will remain.

Who gave James Bradberry a big contract extension before he earned himself a benching in the season’s biggest game? Who stocked the depth chart at safety? At linebacker? Who has consistently tried to build a defense with veteran value additions and has consistently failed at drafting and developing the kind of players who form the heart of every good NFL defense? Who created the framework for such a wide-reaching fiasco?

This isn’t just a Roseman question. He’s a complicated guy. Much smarter than your average NFL general manager, the lot of whom he runs circles around from his value investing desk. The lessons from last year’s Super Bowl run are still true. He is one of the best in the league at patching things together, at timing his team’s competitive cycles, at stocking a roster with upside.

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What has never been true is the notion that Howie figured out how to hack the system. This is the system. That’s what you are witnessing. Get yourself a quarterback on a rookie contract who is capable of an MVP-caliber season, pair him with a stable offensive line, and, yeah, you can absolutely slap a contender together with the right salary-cap chops and eye for value. And then the league adjusts and the quarterback gets more expensive and accumulates more power and the mercenaries depart or raise their rates. The tide goes out and you look around and everyone wonders what exactly it was that you built.

Roseman and Lurie got plenty of credit for remaking their roster on the fly and taking two completely different teams to the Super Bowl in a matter of five years. And they deserved it.

But there is a question: Why did those teams need to be remade in the first place?

We’ll have plenty of time to ponder the answer.

The Eagles made sure of that.

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