Nick Sirianni is coaching for his job in 2024. To keep it, he has to show he’s matured. Oh, the Eagles have to win.

In one sense, the tenuous nature of Nick Sirianni’s job status as the Eagles enter the 2024 season is completely understandable. In another sense, it is completely baffling.

A head coach who has never missed the playoffs in his three years here, who oversaw one of the greatest seasons in franchise history, who is emotional and relatable in all the ways that football fans here usually adore, could get kicked out the door. Everyone understands this reality. No one is surprised by it. No one should be.

That’s how bad the Eagles’ disintegration over the last seven weeks of last season was. That’s how powerless Sirianni was to stop it. Every job on an NFL team — the coaches, the players, the staffers, all of them — is based not on who the person is or what they have accomplished. It is about whether that person can and will thrive in that role in the future.

That’s an owner’s judgment call, and, by that standard, based on the way the bottom fell out for the Eagles, there was real doubt about whether Jeffrey Lurie would bring Sirianni back.

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The passage of time and the presence of some new and accomplished people — Saquon Barkley, Kellen Moore, Vic Fangio — have only made it easier to forget about that collapse. They don’t erase it, and they don’t eliminate the need for Sirianni and the Eagles to prove that it won’t happen again.

For Lurie, the decision to keep Sirianni had to have gotten harder and harder as the losses piled up. The 49ers blow your doors off? Not great, but maybe your team was gassed. The Cowboys dominate you? Ugh, but at least the easy part of the schedule is coming up. Demote the defensive coordinator and have the unit get worse? Throw away victories against two lesser opponents in the Seahawks and the Cardinals? Embarrass yourselves in the regular-season finale against an awful Giants team and in the wild-card round against a so-so Buccaneers team? You could picture Lurie’s fingers and thumbs typing 1-800-BELICHK.

It wasn’t just that the Eagles started losing and couldn’t stop. It was that they transformed from a terrific team to a terrible one in a blink, and Sirianni’s consistent and impotent response was to recite the same ol’ talking points and give the same ol’ speeches. That boulder began rolling, and he was fortunate it didn’t flatten him.

His mission now is pretty simple: He will have to demonstrate that he has matured, that he can handle the highs and lows intrinsic to life in the NFL. He is, in certain regards, as normal a human being as a head coach gets. This is a profession given to paranoia and secrecy, and Sirianni has never displayed those traits. But he also has rarely displayed the requisite self-control to earn a full measure of respect as someone in charge of an NFL team.

He starts talking at a news conference and can’t stop. He emotes on the sideline and in the locker room and everywhere else. He has been an open book — too much of one, reveling in the Eagles’ success, gutted by their failures — and he has let everyone in on those inner roller-coaster rides. He has mugged for the cameras and taunted opposing fans and turned himself and his team into targets for their arrogance. He is a 43-year-old leader who has frequently behaved like a 23-year-old tailgater.

Now he is supposed to be the chief executive officer of the team, the overseer, and that role demands calm, sound judgment from him and some deference from the people ostensibly working under him. That qualifier is needed, because while Sirianni is supposed to be running the show, he had to cede plenty of power and control to Fangio and Moore. The former has been an NFL head coach. The latter could yet be. They’re oh-so handy for Lurie to have on hand, a couple of seat-cushion coordinators: In the case of a 1-4 start, either can be used as a flotation device.

Still, Lurie appears inclined to give Sirianni time to learn, to keep growing in the job. Lurie would love to find another Andy Reid, another head coach he can trust for a decade or more, and had he fired Sirianni after last season, he would have established a pattern of relative instability in the Eagles’ post-Reid era.

Yes, the franchise has won a Super Bowl, reached another, and qualified for the postseason seven times in the 12 years since Reid’s departure, but think about it: Chip Kelly didn’t last three years, and Doug Pederson was fired after one terrible season. Axing Sirianni following an awful seven weeks — and following 33 victories over the Eagles’ previous 42 regular-season and playoff games — would have suggested that Lurie maybe was too impatient or impulsive, It would have raised the question of whether any head coach under him would get any grace period at all.

So Sirianni will get one, but it likely won’t be much of one. From Reid and Donovan McNabb to Pederson and Carson Wentz to Sirianni and Jalen Hurts, Lurie considers the connection between the Eagles’ head coach and franchise quarterback to be the most important relationship in the organization. When that relationship comes to a natural end, when it isn’t as strong as it once was, when that bond breaks, the coach pays, and it’s here, in his relationship with Hurts, where Sirianni’s future with the Eagles is at its most uncertain.

Not only did Hurts regress from his spectacular 2022 season to his inconsistent 2023 campaign, but he offered nothing but tepid defenses of his head coach. Twice — after his late-game audible against the Seahawks led to a crushing interception and after he and the Eagles offense scored just one touchdown against Tampa Bay — Hurts was handed the opportunity to stand up for Sirianni publicly. Twice, Hurts did not, and what made it worse was that Sirianni had stood up for him.

Sirianni had done what he was supposed to do. He had protected his player. He had taken the blame for that Seattle interception, had twisted himself into a pretzel with a silly explanation about having Hurts throw deep to get a pass-interference penalty, and Hurts never returned the favor, never took the heat off his coach, never took public responsibility for his own mistake. Then, when he was asked after the debacle in Tampa whether he wanted Sirianni to return, he was glib and evasive: “I didn’t know he was going anywhere.”

» READ MORE: Jalen Hurts hits all the right notes in his do-over comments on Eagles coach Nick Sirianni

Those answers said as much or more about Hurts as they did about Sirianni, but they were never going to compel Lurie to readjust his priorities. You can lose some respect for Hurts and his lack of loyalty to his head coach and still recognize that if another Eagles season goes bad, the big change that Lurie will make probably won’t be at quarterback.

That Super Bowl berth? Those three playoff appearances? They will be distant memories. Lurie is paying Hurts $255 million to be a great QB, and he is paying Sirianni to win games while making sure Hurts is a great QB. That’s the deal with the Eagles, for better or worse, and Sirianni has to live up to his end of it. He has 17 games, starting now.