No, Eagles coach Nick Sirianni isn’t a rockhead for playing a kid’s game during pre-draft interviews | Mike Sielski
If Sirianni is being genuine and if his offbeat methods help the Eagles glean a little insight, what’s the harm?
Nick Sirianni dared to reveal something interesting Wednesday. During scouting interviews ahead of next week’s NFL draft, he and his assistants would challenge college players to impromptu games to attempt to measure the prospects’ competitiveness. An Eagles coach might play a version of Jeopardy! against a player, for instance, or engage in another quick mano a mano exercise that would allow the coach to observe how a young athlete acts and reacts in a situation in which there is a winner and there is a loser. Sirianni’s game of choice, though, didn’t require extensive knowledge of world history or potent potables.
“I played a couple of them at ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors,’” he said. “It was as easy as that: ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors.’ Let’s see how competitive you are. I’m competitive. I’m going to be talking trash to them. Did you talk trash back to me?”
Over his brief stint as the Eagles’ head coach and in his few interactions with the media who cover the team, Sirianni has displayed the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for golden retrievers and those lucky Star Trek aficionados who happen to shake hands with William Shatner. “It was awesome,” he said of the draft interviews he conducted. “Anything you compete at, when you compete with somebody [who’s] competitive, they’re going to go at you no matter what game you’re playing.”
Now that’s a man who prizes people who compete and who love to compete and who say the word compete a lot, and it does raise the question, given that these interactions took place on Zoom, what Sirianni would have done had they been in person. Rope off a section of the NovaCare Complex into an octagon, I suppose, like it was Det. Roger Murtaugh’s front yard.
All right, enough with the cheap jokes, because they’re just that. They’re easy and cheap, and unless you want high-profile coaches and athletes to continue retreating into the world of banality and cliche whenever they talk publicly about their jobs, unless you like hearing We’ll take ‘em one game at a time until the end of time, you should welcome Sirianni’s openness and candor.
» READ MORE: Brass tactics: Howie Roseman, Andy Weidl and Nick Sirianni detail the Eagles’ approach to the draft
More, there might actually be a method to his earnest madness here. Ten years ago, the Eagles used a first-round pick on an offensive lineman, Danny Watkins, who would have preferred to become a firefighter. In 2014, they used a first-round pick on a defensive end, Marcus Smith, who turned out to be suffering from undiagnosed depression. In 2016, they used the No. 2 overall pick on a quarterback, Carson Wentz, who decided, less than 18 months after signing a four-year contract extension worth as much as $128 million, that he preferred not to play for them anymore.
In each of those cases, the player’s career with the Eagles was truncated not necessarily because of his football skills or his 40 time or his max bench press, but because of something that the team’s scouts and coaches could neither detect nor quantify — even something as severe and debilitating as Smith’s mental illness.
“The big thing to remember with a lot of these players and that we take for granted when watching athletics, whether in college or professionally, is they’re human beings, particularly these college prospects,” NFL Network analyst Ben Fennell said last month. “They’re 20-to-25-year-old, young, maturing adults going through life in a very turbulent time in their lives.
“There’s a lot of reasons for success and failure in the NFL, and it’s rarely on-field ability. We can watch all the tape on these kids and learn everything there is to know about their football makeup and their football DNA, but the big question is ... the human interest stuff. Who is the person? Who is the teammate? Who is the coworker? Who is the member of society we’re getting?”
Drafting players who end up thriving in the NFL is difficult, and the most difficult aspect of the process is getting an accurate assessment of an athlete’s “intangibles”: toughness, mental and emotional health and stability, selfishness or unselfishness, will to win, etc. An evaluator should use whatever means he or she can to gauge those qualities. Will playing a child’s game allow Nick Sirianni to peer into a prospect’s soul? Of course not. But the questions a coach might ask and the challenges he might present matter less to an elite athlete than the coach’s authenticity and purpose in asking and presenting them. Sirianni has been genuine in his exuberance, and if his offbeat approach to an interview can help him and the Eagles glean a little insight into a player they might or might not draft, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Just remember, Nick: Always go Rock. Always.