Nick Sirianni outcoaches Ron Rivera, wins instant replay battle, knows Eagles must be better

Everyone was asking Ron Rivera about the instant replay challenge he lost. But he lost the game because of the instant replay challenge he never made. He never made it because Nick Sirianni thought faster, and prepared his players better. He never made it because that’s the sort of thing that losing teams do. Especially when they play against winning teams.

The Eagles are a winning team. That much is certain. They aren’t always a dominant team. They aren’t always a pretty team. Are they a Super Bowl team? We’ll find that out over the next month. First, against Dallas, then Kansas City, then Buffalo, then San Francisco, then Dallas again. What we know right now is that they are a winning team. The Eagles do the things that winning teams do, which is why they walked out of FedEx Field on Sunday as 38-31 winners.

» READ MORE: The Eagles staggered and stumbled, but A.J. Brown caught them before they fell on their face

The pivotal moment was an incompletion, a pass to nowhere, a play that looked entirely busted. It happened before D’Andre Swift barreled into the end zone for the clinching touchdown, before A.J. Brown put the finishing touches on his record-setting sixth straight game of 125+ receiving yards, before Jalen Hurts threw his fourth touchdown pass in the game.

Late third quarter. Eagles down by seven. First-and-10, Commanders 28-yard line. Hurts pass incomplete short right. That’s how it read in the scorebook. What really mattered were the moments before.

DeVonta Smith had just made a sliding attempt at a 17-yard catch on fourth-and-4 from the Commanders 45-yard line. The officials quickly ruled the play a completion, but the Eagles offense was already in motion. There was Jason Kelce, leading a charge of offensive lineman down the field to join Smith, who’d popped up from the ground and taken his spot along the new line of scrimmage. Picking up the rear was Hurts, hobbling on his injured leg toward the 28-yard line, where he lined up in shotgun and called for the snap. The whole thing looked as if somebody had pulled a fire alarm.

The only thing that mattered was the snap. It came as fast as it needed to.

By the time Hurts had the ball in his hands, the television broadcast had only just begun to show the replay of Smith’s 17-yard catch. By the time it was over, everyone could see that Smith had trapped the ball against the ground before scooping it into his possession. Rivera sure saw it. Just not soon enough.

“I didn’t see it on the screen,” the Commanders coach said. “I was looking up at the screen to see if there was something that could help me with it. Then I was waiting to hear somebody upstairs on if they had seen it or not. We hadn’t seen the replay, so we weren’t sure. They did their hurry-up, ran up to the line, and snapped the ball. You almost think in that amount of time somebody else could have looked at it and saw if it was complete.”

On one hand, this was a near-inexcusable miss by Rivera. He is the one in charge of replay logistics. Whatever the system, it’s his design. It’s his implementation. It’s his mistake when it fails. In this case, Rivera compounded the technological snafu with an egregious strategic miscalculation. His team had a touchdown lead. If the completion stood, the Eagles had a first down at the Commanders 28-yard line. If it didn’t, the Commanders had a first down near midfield. The difference between those two potential outcomes was so great that you have to throw the flag.

Three plays after the challenge-that-wasn’t, the Eagles scored a touchdown to tie the game at 17-17.

So, yeah, bad call.

On the other hand, if we’re going to fault the coach who didn’t think quickly enough, shouldn’t we credit the coach who forced him to do it?

“We practice the heck out of that,” Sirianni said. “It happened last year in the NFC championship game. It happened again today. I don’t want to give up too many secrets, but you try to put yourself in every scenario. We practice that every week. Sometimes it’s, we don’t know if we caught it. Sometimes it’s, we know and we’re trying to bait you. Sometimes it’s, we know we didn’t catch it. All those things can be true. But there’s a lot of effort and time that’s been put into that and our guys do a great job executing it and getting lined up.”

The Eagles are a winning team because of little things like that. You can argue that they were fortunate on Sunday, that they’ve gotten all the breaks throughout their 7-1 start. There’s a lot of truth there. On Sunday, the Eagles got a break in the fourth quarter when replays were inconclusive about the outcome of a third down pass from Sam Howell to Jahan Dotson. The on-field officials initially ruled the play a catch, but changed it to an incompletion. The forced Rivera to challenge, and shifted the burden of proof. Had the call on the field been a catch, it likely would have stood. The Commanders would have had a first down with three minutes left down 31-24. Instead, they were forced to go for it on fourth down and, after Haason Reddick’s sack, turn the ball over to the Eagles on their own 16-yard-line.

» READ MORE: Reed Blankenship and the Eagles secondary leave the Commanders game unsatisfied, but ‘a win is a win’

That’s uncomfortably close. They need to be better. They can’t turn the ball over twice inside the 10-yard-line like they did against the Commanders. The offense can’t go long stretches of the first half looking discombobulated. The defense can’t get shredded by a quarterback like Howell.

“It wasn’t pretty,” Sirianni said. “It wasn’t pretty at all. This is the National Football League and it’s tough to win games. We came into a road game and ended up winning. But we have a lot of work to do to make sure we are continuing to climb.”

He’s right. That’s the NFL. Football is too physical and intricate a game to be perfect for 17 weeks. Every team in the league is going to look ugly at some point.

“Sometimes you have to eat a sloppy joe for lunch,” right tackle Lane Johnson said.

The winning teams are the ones who swallow that sloppy joe without making a mess. Sometimes, you just need to survive.

The Eagles have done that through eight games. They have the best record in the NFL after Kansas City’s blowout upset loss to the Broncos. Credit Brown. Credit Hurts. Credit the offensive line. But don’t forget to credit the coach, too.