Not many head coaches get the opportunity to have fans call for their jobs, yell at said fans, go on to win a Super Bowl that same year, and then get a multi-year contract extension. The list might be exactly one person: Nick Sirianni.
On Monday, the Philadelphia Eagles announced that they were giving their head coach a “multi-year contract extension,” which closes the loop on his hero-to-villain, and villain-back-to-hero story loop.
Nick Sirianni’s hero-to-villain-to-hero cycle is complete
In 2022, Sirianni’s Eagles made it to the Super Bowl with just about as little adversity as any team could ever imagine. They lost that game and the screws started to get loose.
In 2023, The Birds started the season off with a 10-1 record, but it felt entirely different. The wins weren’t blowouts like they were before; nothing looked easy on offense, and guys on the sidelines looked more miserable than they looked like they were having fun.
That all came to a head in Weeks 13 through 18, when the Eagles finished the season with a 1-6 record while the team imploded on itself.
Then comes the 2024 season: A general thought was, ‘No matter what happens and how good the Eagles are in the beginning of the season, there’s always a chance that everything could go to hell in any given week. The second something starts to go bad, Sirianni needs to get canned.’ Luckily, that just stayed an irrational, hoagie-mouthed thought in section 237.
The Eagles started that season 2-2, before they went into their Week 5 bye. Fortunately, the team was able to get it all together and win 17 of their last 18 games and win Super Bowl LIX.
Unfortunately, the game before that bye was a particularly terrible 33-16 loss to the Buccaneers. As a fan, any time there is a loss like that, you want the next game to happen immediately and then to never think about it again.
You certainly don’t want to have to sit and stew about it for two weeks because that's when the thoughts start to creep in… and during the Eagles bye, the thoughts didn’t just creep in, they waltzed right in through the front door, threw their suitcase on the ground and yelled, ‘PAPA’S HOME.’
‘This could’ve been the beginning of another collapse’ (it wasn’t). ‘Sirianni doesn’t deserve this roster’ (he did). ‘This team is terrible’ (they were the best). ‘Probably never going to win again’ (they did and a lot).
Then the Eagles come out of the bye week, Nick Sirianni decides to shave his head like Britney Spears, the team barely gets a win over the Cleveland Browns in Week 6, and then Sirianni yells at his own fans in his home stadium. It was not good.
Somehow, Jeffrey Lurie saw all that and thought, ‘Ah, it’s just a phase. He’ll get over it.’ He was right. Nick didn’t just get the team back on track, but he took them from a team that was getting dragged by a metaphorical train, and turned them into the engineer.
Now, after the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl and Nick Sirianni proved all of the haters (read: most of society) wrong, he gets the most well-deserved contract extension. Get ready for years and years of Sirianni’s outlandish, yet authentic shenanigans.