Nick Sirianni’s future is in doubt. The Eagles are at a crossroads. And Jeffrey Lurie faces the biggest choice of his tenure.
If Lurie fires Sirianni, he doesn't just have to find a new head coach. He has to make a decision about the Eagles' entire approach and philosophy as a franchise.
TAMPA, Fla. — Nick Sirianni jogged off the Eagles’ sideline late Monday night, into the Eagles’ locker room, and into a future in which he may or may not be the Eagles’ head coach next season. Or even next week. No one would have imagined such a scenario seven weeks ago. Now it’s all anyone can think about when it comes to what happened to this team and what happens next for it. It is dizzying that the Eagles have reached this point so quickly, but there promises to be nothing quick or basic about the choice that Jeffrey Lurie faces now.
In the wake of the 32-9 loss to the Buccaneers, in the aftermath of a breathtaking collapse capped in the NFC wild-card round, Lurie has to make a decision about the direction and philosophy of the Eagles’ entire approach to building another Super Bowl team. This is as big as a deal gets. This will be as significant a call as he’s ever made since purchasing the franchise in 1994. No, nothing is simple about this situation at all.
If you weren’t spending halftime Monday night wondering why the Eagles — with A.J. Brown out of the lineup, with Jalen Hurts playing through a dislocated finger, with a defense better suited for a flag-football league — wouldn’t run the ball more often, you might have noticed that a juicy tidbit of NFL news broke. The Atlanta Falcons confirmed that they had interviewed Bill Belichick for their vacant head coaching job. With that revelation, the clock started ticking on Lurie to weigh the crucial question here. OK, assume he fires Sirianni and commences with a complete overhaul of the coaching staff. What then?
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Lurie is famous for favoring a collaborative approach to team-building; that is, he and executive vice president Howie Roseman want to make sure their head coach is in sync with their thinking. Everything has to be seamless from one level to the next, and when it isn’t, Lurie acts to smooth everything over. Chip Kelly wanted more power, got it, and managed only to annoy and infuriate everyone to the point that Lurie couldn’t wait until Kelly’s third season was finished to get rid of him. Doug Pederson won a Super Bowl and believed that victory had earned him more say-so over who would be on his coaching staff and who would not. Lurie didn’t wait all that long to disavow him of that notion.
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But the resumes of the available coaching candidates this hiring cycle threaten to force Lurie to reconsider that approach, if not abandon it altogether. Belichick, Jim Harbaugh, Mike Vrabel, Pete Carroll: These are not go-along-to-get-along leaders. Given the number of big-name and high-quality candidates available, Lurie has to determine how much power he’s willing to cede to a new hire. He has long admired Belichick and Robert Kraft and tried to emulate the Patriots’ two decades of dominance. Would he be willing to bring in Belichick and have him do things his way? True, Belichick told reporters last week, before his parting from the Patriots became official, that he was open to relinquishing his player-personnel responsibilities. Let’s be honest here, though: Once Belichick becomes a head coach, anywhere he becomes a head coach, the team becomes his, and the dynamic wouldn’t be much different with Harbaugh, Carroll, or Vrabel.
For Lurie to hand one of those coaches that much control, he would likely have to demote Roseman or at least strip him of some of his authority. Such upheaval would not be unprecedented for Lurie, of course. When he promoted Kelly in 2015, he exiled Roseman, and don’t forget: Back in 2012, Lurie pushed out his best friend, Joe Banner, as team president. But neither Banner in ‘12 nor Roseman in ‘15 had constructed a roster that won a championship. Roseman has since done it. Quieting his voice within the organization to any degree would be a stunning move, and here’s the other question: Would it make the Eagles better in either the short term or the long run?
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Take Belichick. He is the greatest pro coach of all, but he did not leave the Patriots voluntarily. If he had his way, he would still be coaching them. If he had been coaching them well over the last several seasons — well enough to exceed expectations, at least — he would still be coaching them. He turns 72 in April. Is it reasonable to think that starting over with the Eagles will bring the best out of him? And if Lurie wants to keep Roseman in charge and doesn’t want to change, at its core, the Eagles’ culture, if he prefers to give Sirianni another chance or hire a relatively inexperienced candidate — as he did with Pederson, as he did with Sirianni — how will he justify that course of action when so many accomplished coaches were there for the taking?
This is a hell of a conundrum for Lurie. No one will be shocked if Sirianni is gone soon. This ending — the six losses in seven games, a postseason blowout to a mediocre opponent, the incompetence and embarrassment building like a wave — was that bad. The problems were that obvious. What isn’t obvious is what comes next, what Jeffrey Lurie will do to try to fix a franchise at a crossroads.