Bill Belichick, Mike Tomlin ... Nick Sirianni? Eagles head coach will soon rank among the greats

Heading into Year 3, the Eagles' Nick Sirianni is on pace to join the greats.

Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni laughs during a practice at Lincoln Financial Field on Aug. 30.Read moreMonica Herndon / Staff Photographer

Published Sept. 6, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

It’s mid-morning in late July, and there’s a madman on the loose in South Philadelphia. Nick Sirianni is pacing around a NovaCare complex practice field yelling at everyone in general and no one in particular. Dressed in all black, an old-school bullhorn in his hand, he looks like something you might get if Johnny Cash took a summer job as a rec center lifeguard. Except, the only thing on this man’s mind is pre-snap penalties.

Twice already, the Eagles’ first 11-on-11 session of training camp has been interrupted by breakdowns that would cost them 5 yards. Now, after another miscue, Sirianni has seen enough. The amplitude of his voice renders the bullhorn a moot point. The music in the background seems to dim as he launches into a rant on the unacceptability of the sequence. The essence of his message is clear.

This is how good teams lose.

You watch Sirianni in these moments, and everything begins to make sense. How does a team go from firing its head coach and trading its franchise quarterback to nearly winning a Super Bowl in only two years? How does a 41-year-old former state school position coach go from being an anonymous assistant on nobody’s long list of job candidates to the short list of the best head coaches in the game?

The answers are one in the same.

Sirianni.

Don’t be surprised if the name ends up as singular as the ones the world already knows.

Belichick. Tomlin. Carroll. Reid. Coughlin. Dungy. Parcells.

Sirianni?

Believe it.

Think about the characteristic that unites all of those names.

With the exception of Andy Reid, they weren’t regarded as schematic geniuses. With the possible exception of Bill Parcells, they didn’t ride to their current posts on the coattails of great collections of talent for whom they happened to call plays. None of them preached a message that was any more revolutionary than the one Sirianni was bellowing into his bullhorn more than a month ago.

What set them apart is that their players listened.

Sirianni’s players listen. It’s the ultimate compliment for a coach. It’s one that Sirianni has been receiving since his days on Frank Reich’s staff in Indianapolis. It’s evident to anybody who watches the guy in action.

You heard it from Reich shortly after the Eagles stunned the NFL world by hiring Sirianni in January 2021.

“This guy is brilliant,” the former Eagles offensive coordinator and current Panthers head coach said.

You heard it from Joe Flacco shortly after he joined the team in 2021.

“He’s ready for this role,” the veteran quarterback said. “He’s not afraid to tell it how it is and be honest with guys, and I think that’s why he’s allowed to do that.”

You heard it from Jalen Hurts this summer.

After a practice session in which Hurts’ decision-making drew some tough coaching from Sirianni, the Eagles quarterback made it clear that he was on board.

“I’ve been telling him all year that I’m a coach’s kid,” Hurts said. “Basically all the coaches’ kids out there know what that means.”

Sirianni is a coach’s kid. He is a coach’s younger brother. His father, Fran, was the head coach at Southwestern Central High School in upstate New York, a post also held by his brother Jay. Another brother, Mike, is the head coach at Washington and Jefferson College in western Pennsylvania.

That background is evident any time Sirianni speaks. The best football coaches have a reverence not just for the sport but for the profession itself. Everybody loves the rewards of coaching. The accolades. The headlines. The thrill of victory. Those are things that all of us would love. For guys like Sirianni, they are secondary to the grind.

In the week leading up to their preseason opener, the Eagles held their annual open practice at Lincoln Financial Field. The event is largely a photo op, a chance to whet the appetite of 50,000 fans as they watch the team practice in uniform. Yet Sirianni’s impression from that session was a need for improvement. He wasn’t satisfied with the communication between himself and his coaches in a stadium setting. So he rearranged the following week’s schedule and held another practice at the Linc.

“I felt it for myself that I needed some reps there,” Sirianni said. “So really it was self-awareness of like, man, you know what? At the stadium practice on Sunday night, I needed a little bit more work. I had to be locked into that part, and so I wanted to run a little bit more like a game. It was more about me and just the coaches.”

Self-awareness is a strength. In a lot of ways, it’s the ultimate one. It’d be easy to describe Sirianni’s personality as infectious. But infectiousness is not necessarily a good thing. A fungus is infectious. Bad personalities are often as infectious as good ones.

The key to Sirianni’s hallmark enthusiasm is its authenticity. He is not your typical rah-rah players’ coach. He is who he is, and he recognizes who he isn’t.

That recognition is the biggest reason to believe that Sirianni is on a much more sustainable path than the last couple of coaches who occupied his office. All coaches are control freaks, but his decision to give up play-calling duties last season suggests a control freak who is in charge of that impulse and can prioritize the bigger picture.

For both him and the Eagles, the big picture is bright. The schedule is a bear. The injuries will happen. But the head coach is here to stay.