Nick Sirianni and Jalen Hurts had ‘great moments’ together. Can their confab save the coach’s job?

Nick Sirianni would have everyone believe that the thoughts that cause him to bolt out of bed in the dead of night don’t have anything to do with his job security. A coach thinks about coaching and little else, he said Wednesday, and the only questions that preoccupy him to the point that he can no longer sleep have to do with his team’s performance on the field and his effect on it. What will I say to my players? How do we get better? Any other consideration would be a waste.

“You can say, ‘Oh, that’s coach-talk,’” he said. “I’m not bull[bleeping] you. That’s how I live. That’s how I’ve operated. You are who your habits are, and that’s how I’ve been operating for a big portion of my life.”

If there were ever a week when a few fissures might form in Sirianni’s rock-solid routine, this might be the one. In Florham Park, N.J., the embarrassment for Woody Johnson — the owner of the New York Jets, formerly the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom — of having his cronies watch Aaron Rodgers play a lousy game in London was enough to cause him to fire head coach Robert Saleh on Tuesday. And in Cleveland, one of two things is going on with the Browns — the Eagles’ next opponent — and neither of them is logical or intelligent. Either coach Kevin Stefanski refuses to bench the team’s $230 million albatross and well-respected man about town, Deshaun Watson. Or he’s not allowed to bench him because owner Jimmy Haslam is unfamiliar with the term sunk cost and thinks having Watson sit on the bench is more humiliating than having Watson play quarterback. Which, admittedly, is a tough call.

The Eagles, for all the concerns they’ve raised about themselves with their 2-2 start, aren’t nearly the mess that those two teams are (and pretty much always have been). But lately, the Eagles have been closer to that bottom-feeder level than they’d like. They’ve won just three of their last 11 games dating to last season, and over that time, Sirianni’s relationship with Jalen Hurts and their public comments about each other have ignited speculation that there’s a disconnect between them that might be unbridgeable. Whatever has been going on, it was apparently enough of an issue that the two of them convened a summit of sorts during the bye week. Hurts said Wednesday that he had “great moments with Nick,” though he declined to describe those moments in any detail.

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“We’re the two leaders of the team,” Hurts said, “and I’m happy and fortunate that we were able to come together in harmony and have the same goal in mind in trying to get this thing right. I have a ton of confidence in him, a ton of confidence in what he brings and everything he’s been able to accomplish. Just press on. Everybody goes through different moments. Everybody experiences adversity. But we’ve experienced different levels of adversity together, and we’re excited for what’s to come.”

It was a wonder Hurts didn’t fire up a turntable, drop the needle on a New Seekers 45, and start singing about how he’d like to build Sirianni a home and furnish it with love. His rhapsody about harmony should keep the questions and conjecture at bay for a while, provided the Eagles handle the 1-4 Browns on Sunday. But even a victory over a bad team won’t alter the power dynamic that will define Sirianni’s future here — the same one that’s at the core of the Jets’ and Browns’ problems.

When the owner concludes he has to choose, whom is he sticking with: the head coach or the quarterback?

The question, in the modern NFL, all but answers itself. Jeffrey Lurie has been a more stable, smarter steward of his franchise than Johnson and Haslam have been of theirs, but in this regard, he’s no different from them or any other of his peers. The quarterback makes more money. The quarterback is or has a better chance to become a celebrity, a star of rental-car and life-insurance commercials, the franchise’s face. The quarterback is more valuable. And even in those instances when an owner has cast his lot with his head coach, there’s often a tinge of regret for it, maybe more than a tinge. Does Robert Kraft think letting Tom Brady walk away and keeping Bill Belichick was the right thing to do? If Lurie had to do it over again, would he let Chip Kelly trade Nick Foles to the Rams in 2015?

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It’s easy to see where we’re going with this. If Johnson had called a press conference Tuesday and said, Robert’s not going anywhere. Aaron needs to play better, it would have been the most shocking development in the league this season. If Haslam had empowered Stefanski to make his own decisions about who ought to be the Browns’ starting QB, the Eagles would already know to prepare to face Jameis Winston on Sunday. And if Hurts doesn’t stop turning the ball over and start playing like he did in 2022, Lurie will have 255 million reasons to blame someone else first and foremost for the franchise quarterback’s regression.

That’s the hard reality of being an NFL head coach. That’s the situation that Nick Sirianni has to negotiate for these next 13 weeks. It’s the kind of thing that might keep a man up at night.