Have Jalen Hurts’ independence and other team issues rendered Nick Sirianni irrelevant with the Eagles?

As the Eagles enter one of their most important seasons in history, it’s hard to ignore that the head coach seems ... unimportant.

Diminished.

Irrelevant.

There were hints of this development all offseason, from the delayed postseason meeting owner Jeffrey Lurie had with Nick Sirianni, who lobbied to keep his job; to the purge of Sirianni’s assistant coaches; to the hiring of high-powered coordinators Vic Fangio and Kellen Moore, the latter of whom was given complete control of the offense, formerly Sirianni’s bailiwick.

The most startling revelation came Wednesday in an ESPN.com story that detailed a much wider rift between Sirianni and Hurts in 2023 than previously had been reported. Hurts, the $255 million franchise quarterback, went off the reservation to get advice from fired Giants defensive coordinator Wink Martindale, who twice had frazzled Hurts during the Eagles’ late-season slide.

» READ MORE: Eagles’ Jalen Hurts addresses a report that he asked a rival coach for advice

Hurts spoke with Martindale for about 30 minutes in the week of practice before the NFC wild-card game in Tampa, Fla.

How unusual was this?

“I’ve been doing this for 40 years,” one former NFL defensive coordinator told ESPN, who said “it’s the first time I’ve had an opposing quarterback call me up.”

That former DC? Wink Martindale.

He now is the DC at Michigan. (Of course, when they spoke, Martindale might have wound up on any NFL staff, and who knows what he’d picked from Hurts’ brain during their conversation.)

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This was an astonishing gambit by Hurts. It was an insult to the Eagles’ entire coaching staff. It showed a lack of faith and a degree of exasperation far deeper than anything we’d suspected.

Hurts appears to have gone behind his coach’s back for coaching. The ESPN piece implied this but did not explicitly state it. The Eagles were asked to clarify on Friday but had not clarified by the time this piece was published.

Look, I’m not even sure that Hurts did the wrong thing here; at least, not with malice or intent. He clearly was trying to help his team win but had no confidence in his coaching staff, which had the same objective — and, apparently, the same strategy. A league source said Eagles coaches called Martindale that week, too. But Hurts appears to have called on his own.

All of which distills to this question:

Is the relationship between Sirianni and Hurts broken beyond repair? Is this a fresh injury and a wound that cannot heal? If so, how does it affect Sirianni’s profile with the rest of a team full of accomplished, established veterans?

“Jalen and I are in a really good place,” Sirianni, in his Thursday news conference, told Tim McManus, one of the ESPN reporters who wrote the story — a story to which Sirianni and Hurts would not contribute.

That in itself indicates inappropriate actions on Hurts’ behalf and a lingering rift.

“Every relationship that you have needs work, with everybody,” Sirianni continued, “and we’ve always continued to try to work at that.”

Which lends credence to another quote in the ESPN story:

“There was never a moment last year where they were operating in a healthy relationship.”

Yikes.

This is not to imply that CEO coaches cannot win. I love the concept of CEO coaches, but the “C” part — being a chief — incorporates control and implies power. I’m not sure Sirianni has much of either.

And no, coaches and QBs don’t need to be best buddies to win. Chuck Noll and Terry Bradshaw wouldn’t pick each other up in the rain, but they won the Steelers four Super Bowls. Dan Reeves and John Elway went to three Super Bowls in four years despite a decade of animosity.

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Nick Sirianni ain’t Chuck Noll or Dan Reeves.

It feels like we can just stop pretending that Sirianni is Hurts’ boss in any capacity beyond the big decisions, like going for it on fourth down. I’m not joking about that. Hurts is a star quarterback. Sirianni is a fourth-year, first-time coach for whom there was no market when he replaced Doug Pederson in 2021. Hurts holds all the power.

Really, what is Sirianni going to make Jalen do? He’s not coaching Hurts’ mechanics, he’s not designing plays, he’s not implementing the scheme. Remember, Hurts told us that Moore’s offense is 95% new. Let’s put that another way: If Lurie had fired Sirianni and his entire staff, whatever offense was installed would be about 95% new, because about 5% of all offenses are the same at their core.

We should have seen this coming.

Hurts and A.J. Brown routinely ignored play calls from Sirianni and former offensive coordinator Brian Johnson, with Sirianni’s blessing — all of this according to Sirianni.

At workouts this spring, Hurts provided an enigmatic answer to a simple question regarding Sirianni’s adjustment to playing second fiddle to Moore in the offensive hierarchy:

“That’s a great question. I don’t know that I know the answer to it.”

Finally, at the beginning of training camp, Hurts admitted that he and Sirianni weren’t completely simpatico in 2023:

“I think we’re in a great place. ... If we were on the same page, we maybe would have accomplished the things we would have [last season], and we didn’t, and that’s a learning experience.”

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None of this means that the Eagles can’t win. After all, Barry Switzer and Brian Billick won Super Bowls on the backs of incredible players, superior assistants, and outstanding front offices, all of which this Eagles team has.

But there does need to be a modicum of tolerance, if not respect, between the head man and the most important player. Calling the other teams’ coaches and going rogue on the regular is a strange way of showing respect.

Can this Eagles team survive it?