How the Eagles are learning from Penn State, the La Salle-St. Joe’s Prep rivalry, and even peewee football

The Eagles made the Cowboys look like a peewee team on Sunday, dominating Dallas in their 34-6 win while forcing five turnovers.

Maybe that’s because in film study ahead of the game, Nick Sirianni drew inspiration from a peewee team’s play that went viral earlier in the week.

“Good teams learn from their mistakes, and great teams learn from everybody’s mistakes,” Sirianni said postgame. “You can watch situational football throughout the week and say, ‘Hey, here’s what this team did in this scenario,’ and you get better from that, whether it was good or bad, and you do the same thing with fundamentals. I really look at football IQ and fundamentals very similar, so that’s a big process of what we go through early in the week, the process we go through late in the week, and you can always learn from it.”

During film study, the defense watches turnovers from around the NFL and around the football world at large, from college to peewee, Sirianni told reporters on Sunday night. Showing other teams and players in different situations allows for more teaching opportunities than just what the Eagles can put together in practice or tape from past games.

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Even if the players they’re learning from are kids.

“This little kid ran from behind and took it from that guy, because that guy wasn’t locked in,” Sirianni said. “We’ll learn from anything we can possibly learn from.”

Another recent example was Ohio State quarterback Will Howard’s first-quarter fumble against Penn State, which resulted in a touchback after Howard fumbled it through the end zone.

“There was an Ohio State-Penn State play where the guy had the ball on his outside arm,” Sirianni said. “Good tomahawk hit on the ball near the goal line on the quarterback of Ohio State, [ball] rolled out of bounds. We’re going to learn from everything we possibly can.”

Sirianni even draws teaching lessons from local high school action. While he hasn’t watched film on St. Joseph’s Prep’s win over La Salle on Saturday just yet, Sirianni said he expects he’ll learn something from that game too.

The Eagles aren’t the only ones going over other teams’ film — it goes both ways. La Salle beat nationally ranked St. Joe’s Prep earlier this year using its own version of the Philly Special on a two-point conversion.

“Anything we can learn from, we will. And I think that’s the sign of a good team. Again, I said what I say to the guys a lot. Good teams learn from their mistakes; great teams learn from the mistakes across the league. And it doesn’t have to be the league.

“It can be from college football, it can be peewee football, it can be high school football — it doesn’t matter,” Sirianni said. “Just always in a mindset of getting better.”

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