3 mistakes Nick Sirianni can't afford to make to keep his job this season

What Nick Sirianni does well for the Philadelphia Eagles, he does really well. No one should knock him for that. He was hired as an offensive mind and has (maybe, but turns out not really) been neutered of offensive responsibilities. That leaves him as a CEO head coach. 

Theoretically, that’s the perfect spot for Nick. He’s not good at what he got hired for, but his players really like playing for him. Aside from some reports about Jalen Hurts not getting along with Nick (that they’ve put to rest), it seems like he somehow kept the locker room together during the 2023 collapse, which is an incredible feat. Love him or hate him, Nick is good at that, which means he’s good at this specific job.

Nick Sirianni has dug himself into a hole, and it seems like he’s trying to go even deeper

It’s some of the other things about Nick that make him bad at this job. He’s shown that he’s boneheadedly stubborn and overly self-confident. He can’t stop himself from letting Kellen Moore do his job as the offensive coordinator. That means we’ve either been misinformed about Nick’s role or his pride won’t keep him away from affecting the offense.

The Week 3 win took him off the butt-searing hot seat and put him on just the regular old hot seat. He’s said that the way the Eagles are winning is unsustainable, and if they really are, that means things can go south in a hurry and he’ll be right back into third-degree burn territory. There are a few things he can do to help him keep his job. 

Telling too much of truth is a bad thing

It's tough to figure out how honest Nick is when he’s speaking. He says things that seem open and honest, but then news comes out that completely invalidates what he says.

Look at last season, after the Monday Night Football game in Seattle, he came out and said that Jalen Hurts’ interception at the end of the game was on him. A few weeks later, A.J. Brown said that he and Jalen freelanced on that play and that Nick was covering for them.

Then there was the time when he said there were going to be no changes in the coaching staff after the Eagles lost to the 49ers in Week 13. A couple of days later, Sean Desai essentially lost his job as the defensive coordinator and Matt Patricia took over.

The best bet is to assume he’s being honest because if he’s not, you know that he’s going to get blasted by everyone and it will validate your anger towards his lies. That being said, if Nick wants to keep his job he should probably stop telling the complete truth.

After his absolute blunder of a decision to kick a field goal at the end of the Week 2 game, he went into way too specific detail about the way he goes about analytics. He essentially said that anyone can go into any number of analytics models to see if it says whether or not a team should go for it or kick it, but based on his studies of what teams have done in that situation he decided to kick the field goal because that’s what he felt was the right thing. He simply did not need to go into that kind of detail. (3:50 in the video below)

The NFL is a copycat league, and Eagles’ owner Jeffery Lurie had gone out of his way to make the Eagles a team that gets copied. This is especially true when it comes to the usage of analytics. The most prominent example is that the Eagles won a Super Bowl with decisions largely based on the numbers and not just Doug Pederson’s gut feeling. 

So Sirianni coming out and saying that he did his own research and that he’s "even more convicted" on his decision based on bad research, is wildly reckless when it comes to trying to hold his job. There’s no way Lurie is cool with Sirianni saying and believing something like that.

Even if he doesn’t mean it, Nick could just say, ‘Yeah, I made a bad decision right there. That one’s on me. My bad. I was dumb and I cost the team the game.’ Everyone will agree, make fun of him, and spitefully move forward. 

Just stop making decisions entirely

If you’re an anti-analytics person, that’s totally fine; Football was played for years and years without analytics and it was awesome. If you are a pro-analytics person that’s totally fine; Numbers tell a story and teams should do what gives them the highest percent chance of winning. Just know that the Eagles are a pro-analytic team and Lurie supports that.

There are systems in place. There are people hired specifically to interpret information and inform the coaches about what the numbers say the correct decision is. Sirianni chooses to do his own thing.

Let’s go back to the Super Bowl LVII. The Eagles were down one point with 10:33 left in the fourth quarter and the Eagles hadn’t been able to stop the Chiefs offense at all in the second half. It was fourth-and-three and Sirianni punted from his own 32-yard line. Kadarius Toney returned the punt 65 yards and the rest is history.

That punt was a bad decision. The numbers tell you that the Eagles had a 56% chance of succeeding if they went for it. If they did succeed, their winning percentage increased. Sirianni punted and he paid for it. Hell, we all paid for it.

His defense of that decision was, “I think you get 32 out of 32 NFL coaches punting there.” That’s a bad defense for a game-changing play.

He cannot be trusted to make the right decisions, yet he still trusts himself to make them. If Grandpa keeps hitting mailboxes, you take away his keys. If Nick doesn’t want to lose his job, then he needs to realize that he is Grandpa.

Please stop calling plays. Please. Please.

Nick is a bad play-caller. There’s no confirmed time for when he actually did give up play-calling duties, but it’s pretty clear that it was somewhere around Week 7 and Week 8 of the 2021 season. 

The Eagles lost to the Raiders 33-22 in Week 7 which brought their record to 2-5. In Week 8 they destroyed the Lions 44-6 which turned the season around and they ended with a 9-8 record.

Sirianni said the reason he stopped calling plays was because he had trouble calling the plays, communicating with his coordinators, and managing the team. Jonathan Gannon, the defensive coordinator at the time, said that he was the one who suggested it. Believe whatever you want from all that, but the facts are the facts: the team turned around when Nick didn’t have a line to the quarterback’s helmet.

Let’s say your grass keeps dying because you scalp your lawn every time you mow it, and either you or someone else in your house says, ‘Hey, the grass would probably grow if it wasn't getting cut down to the dirt. Maybe a professional lawn company would do a better job.’ Then you hire a lawn company that doesn’t cut too low and your grass starts growing better, it would be crazy for you to go back to mowing your own lawn, right?

Nick is too stubborn to realize that. Nick would say, ‘Pssh, I’ve seen what they did. I can do that,’ and then went right back to butchering his lawn.

From what we know, when Nick’s fingerprints are on the play calling for this offense, things go wrong. The man has too much pride to just sit by and be the CEO head coach. He needs to leave his mark, and unfortunately, it’s a skid mark.