Howie Roseman, Nick Sirianni looked like sad and punished puppies as they reviewed Eagles’ lost season
Like two little boys who got in trouble, they promised "fresh ideas" and a new offense that will incorporate the plays that already work. Which means they're keeping the Tush Push.
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Nick Sirianni looked like a guy who was happy that his key card still worked. Sitting to his right, Howie Roseman looked like a guy who wondered why Sirianni’s key card still worked.
Oh, to have been a fly on the boring white walls of the NovaCare Complex last week. Oh, to have witnessed the wrath of Jeffrey Lurie.
After 11 weeks of the 2023 season, Lurie was riding high, 10-1, the best record in the NFL, coming off his third Super Bowl appearance as the Eagles’ owner. He then was humiliated by the 49ers, Cowboys, Giants, and, in the playoffs, the Buccaneers. Last week he met with Roseman, his GM, and Sirianni, his head coach. That unpopular duo met with the assembled press Wednesday.
It wasn’t pretty.
Their ears had been boxed, their necks’ napes grabbed and wrung, their hands smacked with splintery wooden rulers, and, curiously, they sat rather gingerly on their chairs, if you know what I mean.
Roseman, usually alert and fiery, spoke in hushed tones with bags under his eyes the size of wind socks. Sirianni, usually loud and chipper, had the face of a man who hadn’t slept in days, the voice of a man who’d been ordered to tone it down, and the posture of a man who’d been spending too much time at his desk, making calls.
» READ MORE: Murphy: Kliff Kingsbury, Eagles offensive coordinator? Really?
After two years of cock-of-the-walk demonstrations, Roseman, who won a Super Bowl six years ago, and Sirianni, who took him back there a year ago, have been humbled.
After 35 minutes of confession and penitence, this is what we learned.
They’re scared to death of their $255 million quarterback Jalen Hurts, whom Lurie takes credit for drafting and who regressed in his third full season as a starter, all under Sirianni.
They’re embarrassed over the defensive coordinator debacle; Sirianni stripped first-year coordinator Sean Desai of play-calling privileges after 13 games, and, bizarrely, did not fire him; but Desai’s replacement, high-profile “adviser” Matt Patricia, was even worse. Neither will return for 2024.
Sirianni’s offense is dead. After being asked for weeks if his motionless, RPO-based shotgun scheme had grown predictable, Sirianni finally admitted Wednesday that it had grown “a little bit stale.” Sirianni gave up play-calling seven games into his rookie season in 2021, but now, possibly at the insistence of Lurie, Sirianni will defer construction of the new offense’s structure and philosophy to whoever agrees to become the OC and play-caller.
Roseman, perhaps the best GM in sports, was astonished at the collapse of his young defensive line, with first-rounders Jalen Carter, Jordan Davis, and Nolan Smith. He doesn’t have the resources to quickly fix it, and that terrifies him.
This was the annual end-of-year address, but it was anything but typical. It usually occurs within a day or so of the final game. This was nine days coming. Roseman offered a handful of strange and convoluted reasons for the delay: a “sadness” in the locker room after the playoff disaster in Tampa, slow exit interviews with players, and even the weekend snowstorm.
In reality, the Eagles needed time for Lurie to return from a trip to Saint Martin to look at boats, after which he met with Sirianni and Roseman. After that, Sirianni and Roseman then had to fire Desai and offensive coordinator Brian Johnson, Hurts’ chief ally, and begin the process to replace them. An ESPN story that broke Wednesday during their press conference reported that 65-year-old Vic Fangio would be leaving the Dolphins’ DC job to return to Pennsylvania and coach out his dotage in Philly.
» READ MORE: Report: Eagles ‘expected’ to hire Vic Fangio as defensive coordinator
At any rate, after getting their house in the best order they could manage, Roseman and Sirianni staggered to the stage to face the music.
Questions asked ... and answered?
Who hired Desai, and why did they abandon him midstream? The Eagles claim that Desai was always Sirianni’s choice (after Sirianni passed over, then fired, defensive backs coach Dennard Wilson). They deny reports that the front office demanded Desai be pushed aside, and insist it was solely Sirianni’s idea to strip Desai midseason, with no input from Roseman or Lurie, who have a history of meddling.
Roseman said, “Coach comes to me and tells me what he’s thinking. No different than when he decided to hand [former offensive coordinator] Shane [Steichen] the play-calling duty. He said, ‘Hey, this is what I’m going to do.’ I trust him with the coaching staff. That’s his responsibility, just like he trusts me with my front office staff.”
Of course, Sirianni has no input on Roseman’s front office staff, since Roseman’s his boss, but nerves get to all of us. Roseman took several drinks of water during this explanation.
For his part, Sirianni expressed no regret: “Any decision I make that doesn’t work out, you can second-guess it.”
He then compared switching coordinators to going for it on fourth down and the play choices he makes during a four-minute drive. Granted, some of Sirianni’s fourth-down decisions and four-minute calls made as little sense as switching DCs, but the magnitude of the choices are incomparable.
How close was Sirianni to getting canned after finishing 1-6? Not very, according to Roseman ... mainly because Sirianni had beaten lots of bad teams on the way. Hmm.
“The important thing for us to look at is, before this stretch ... we were 26-5 in the last 31 games,” Roseman said. “It’s hard to find a head coach in this league who had that record of success.”
Which must have been music to Sirianni’s ears, considering this, he said, was his mindset entering his meetings with Lurie: “How do I re-prove myself?”
Apparently, by firing his top offensive assistant.
» READ MORE: Who’ll be the Eagles’ next offensive coordinator? Here are 9 candidates to watch.
“It’s about coming up with fresh ideas,” Sirianni said. “Brian, being at that position ... unfortunately, he’s the one who’s leaving at this particular time.
“Whoever the new coordinator is, there’s going to be things that they bring that are fresh ideas for us,” Sirianni said “There have been some things that we’ve done really well on offense. You’ll mesh in some of that, as well.”
Looks like they’re keeping the Tush Push.
As for Hurts, well, we’ve seen this act before. Lurie tends to spoil a franchise quarterback when he has one, so Hurts’ preference will influence who gets the coordinator’s job.
“That scheme has to be something ... our quarterback can excel at,” Sirianni said. “You want there to be comfort with Jalen and whoever is this new coordinator. Just like I talk to Howie about it, just like I talk to Kevin Patullo about it, I’ll talk to Jalen about that as well.”
(Patullo, who coached receivers for Sirianni when Sirianni was offensive coordinator with the Indianapolis Colts, has been the Eagles’ passing game coordinator since Sirianni arrived and added the title of associate head coach this past season. He’s Sirianni’s right-hand man, and it sounds like he’s safe. It also sounds like he’ll continue to have a hand in game-planning and, as a former college quarterback, have a hand in Hurts’ development).
It sounds as if Sirianni will not be as closely involved with Hurts’ further development as he has been, and that the new OC’s No. 1 job will be salvaging Lurie’s No. 1 investment.
“A guy who has a vision. A guy who’s going to call the plays. A guy who’s going to be able to coach the quarterback, in the same sense, there,” Sirianni said.
» READ MORE: Murphy: Only Jalen Hurts can fix the Eagles offense. But he needs the right kind of help.
The quarterback was far from the Eagles’ biggest problem this year. That was the defense, and it appears to have Roseman stumped.
Asked about his defense’s deterioration as it related to personnel, Roseman said, “I hold myself to a very high standard,” but didn’t address the shortcomings.
In response to a subsequent question regarding the underperformance of his pedigreed defensive line, Roseman tried to defend his aversion to using big money or high draft picks at linebacker. It was weird to pivot to linebacker, and, as an added oddity, his linebacker spiel made no sense.
The interview session was the most awkward since Sirianni’s absurd introductory press conference, which really introduced him to the world, not just Philly. An obscure coordinator out of Indianapolis, recommended to Lurie by former Colts coach and former Eagles OC Frank Reich, Sirianni displayed puppy-dog energy that day that tainted him around the league as an unserious poser.
A 33-11 record and an NFC title did much to erase that taint, but you can imagine that Lurie was wondering last week if he’d hired the right man three years ago.
Sirianni was a gamble in 2021, an underdog coach whose “dog mentality” infected his players with focus and resilience.
Losing six of seven left everybody looking like sad little pups.