Eagles’ play-caller drama is meaningless. Jalen Hurts is the only variable that matters.

It might be Shane Steichen’s voice in the earhole, but these will be Nick Sirianni’s plays. That’s one of two takeaways from the Great Play-Calling Caper of 2022. But the most important one is this: Jalen Hurts needs to execute.

To catch you up on all of the drama, let’s start by noting that we are currently in the June portion of the NFL calendar year. In other words, we are at a point in time where everything we happen to be talking about is mostly a product of needing to find something to talk about besides baseball. There are plenty of ways to spin the biggest news of the early Eagles summer, but none of them matter. In fact, the news itself doesn’t matter. It isn’t even new.

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Last December, Nick Sirianni used a midweek press conference to all but publicly announce that he was not the Eagles’ primary offensive play-caller, happily confirming in a follow-up question that the offensive coordinator Steichen was the person responsible for calling the plays. A couple of months ago, The Inquirer’s Jeff McLane offered further context, reporting that Sirianni had handed over play-calling responsibilities at midseason in order to lessen his load in between the whistles.

And so it was.

Until last week, at least. It was then that McLane followed up on his springtime report by asking Steichen about the switch. And it was then that Steichen uttered the fateful words, “I’ll be calling the plays next year.”

And, thus, it was then that everybody freaked out.

Everybody, except Sirianni.

“Again, just remember this,” Sirianni said Wednesday after the Eagles wrapped up their final workout of the pre-training-camp phase of the summer. “I’m on the headset talking about the next group of plays. The plays are discussed [regarding] what’s coming up.”

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Point is, we need to be clear about what we’re talking about when we talk about who is calling the plays. If every game is an audiobook, Steichen is simply the guy reading the words.

The majority of plays in an NFL game are called long before the opening kickoff. There is a minimal amount of decision-making that is done in the 25 seconds that a quarterback’s headset is live. Sirianni and Steichen spend their entire week deciding which plays they will call in which situations. The hard work is deciding what goes on that Waffle House menu on Sunday. From there, everything kind of flows on its own.

“I don’t want you guys to get caught up in this, well, because he’s calling the plays on game day, that’s it,” Sirianni said. “There is so much that happens before the games are being called, and I’m not going to tell you the percentage of plays that I call or what he calls, but there’s just so much that’s happening before that, it is a true group effort going into it. Then it’s just a matter of who’s the one calling it on Sunday.”

The only job responsibilities that matter in all of this are those of the guy on the receiving end of these play calls. Jalen Hurts is the most relevant variable in this formula, the same way Tom Brady was in New England and Ben Roethlisberger was in Pittsburgh and Lamar Jackson is in Baltimore. Look at it that way and you’ll see how little any of this means. Bill Belichick, Mike Tomlin, and John Harbaugh are three of the most accomplished head coaches in the last two decades of the NFL game. None of them are offensive play-callers in the mold of Andy Reid or Sean McVay or Kyle Shanahan. All of them have presided over some damn good offenses.

From that perspective, Sirianni’s decision to “give up” the primary play-calling duties is another sign that his vibe is exactly what the Eagles need at their current stage. I’ve been plenty critical of Jeffery Lurie and Howie Roseman over the last 10-plus years, but it’s pretty clear that Lurie knows what he is looking at when he is in the interview room with a prospective head coach. When the Eagles announced that they’d hired Sirianni from out of nowhere last winter, it was easy to joke that Lurie had spent his pandemic binge-watching Ted Lasso. But maybe a little Lasso is what the Eagles needed.

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“I think that’s where a lot of problems happen in the NFL is from an ego standpoint,” Sirianni said Wednesday. “It’s what is the best thing to do. If I said, ‘I’m going to stand on a table and run these plays that we ran with Philip Rivers, because that’s what we do,’ that’s an ego thing to me. So, it’s the same thing here. I felt like I needed to make a change in the sense of how to free me up to be a better head coach, and I had a good assistant to call the plays, and so that’s what I went with.”

Again, you can spin the results any way you want. The big change in the Eagles’ season came when they realized that their best strategy was to limit what they asked of Hurts. No team in the NFL rushed for more yards than the Eagles did in their last 11 games. It wasn’t even close. The Eagles clocked in with 2,033 yards on the ground, more than 200 ahead of second-place Indianapolis. Was that a result of Steichen calling the plays? Or was it a result of Sirianni and Steichen collectively realizing where their bread was best buttered?

Here’s the stark reality: Only four teams passed for fewer yards than the Eagles did in their last 11 games. Even as the Eagles went 7-4, Hurts averaged just 184.9 yards passing with eight touchdowns, five interceptions, 14 sacks, and an 85.9 QB rating. Hurts averaged a mere 25 pass attempts during that stretch.

This wasn’t a matter of Steichen dusting off the old Justin Herbert playbook. This was Sirianni recognizing what kind of team the Eagles needed to be in order to win, and that such a team required him to be a head coach rather than a play-caller.

That’s a good thing, mind you. Lurie got a good one in Sirianni. At the end of the day, though, Hurts is the only person who can turn the Eagles offense into a unit capable of winning a Super Bowl. Everything else is early summer noise.