Eagles news: Piling on Sirianni, Jalen Carter mini suspension, A.J. Brown update

When you lose pathetically in the national spotlight of Monday Night Football, you will be put on blast, deservedly. The Philadelphia Eagles have found themselves in that exact spot after Week 2, which is much earlier in the season than anyone would like.

The three big stories coming out of the Eagles’ Week 2 loss are about Nick Sirianni, the defensive line, and the absence of A.J. Brown. Those stories aren’t going away anytime soon. There are two ways to deal with this, avoid it all and hide in your own brain, or dive in head first and take the pain like a champ. We’re diving in.

Eagles news: The team has changed, but one guy is still the same

No matter which way you look at it, you’re right: Nick Sirianni blundered the Eagles' final red zone possession. Should he have run the ball on third down? It would’ve been a game-clinching first down at best and bled time off the clock at worst. You’re correct. The Eagles should have run the ball.

Should he have passed the ball? The Falcons sold out on the run and the pass to Saquon worked, except for the part where he dropped it. So yes, you’re right. If he caught that ball, the game was over.

No matter which side of the aisle you’re on, you’re right. Now for the fourth down call? There’s no argument: kicking a field goal was undeniably wrong.

Shane Haff of Bleeding Green Nation wrote, “This brings us to the final poor game management decision: kicking a FG to turn a 1 score game into a 1 score game. It is 4th and 3 at the ATL 10-yard line with 1:39 on the clock. The Eagles make the decision to kick a FG, which not only eliminates the possibility of winning the game on 1 play, it also gives up 20 yards of field position (via the ensuing kickoff/touchback) with no time runoff in a situation where time is paramount, and the Falcons have no timeouts.”

If Sirianni chose to not be a coward and to go for it on fourth down, one of three things could’ve happened: The Eagles got a touchdown to make it a two-score game, got a first down to seal the game, or failed and made the Falcons make a decision. A field goal put the Eagles up six points. That means the Falcons were in a do-or-die situation. 

The last thing you want to do is give the Falcons a definite goal. This is purely a mind game: If you go up six points, the Falcons know they have to make it to the endzone. They have no other choice than to get a touchdown and win. If the Eagles stay with a three-point lead, the Falcons are in a spot where they just have to kick a field goal to stay alive, they will play conservatively and not take kill shots downfield because that’s what offenses do. Hell, you might even get them to waste a play where they move the ball to either hash to make their kicker’s life easier. 

Sirianni’s only job is to make decisions and he made a decision that ultimately lost the game. Losing games in crunch time is nothing new for Sirianni’s Eagles.

Reuben Frank of NBC Sports Philadelphia wrote, “The players have changed. A bunch of ‘em. Twenty-two guys who started a game last year are gone. The coaches have changed. Both coordinators and half a dozen position coaches are new this year. The one thing that hasn’t changed, the biggest common denominator, is Sirianni, and when we start to assign blame for yet another preposterous nightmare Eagles loss, that’s where we have to start.”

He’s 100 percent right. The story of this Eagles’ season is that we’re going to learn a lot about everyone. When there are that many changing variables, it can be difficult to learn. It’s hard to discern what things are caused by what. 

What we’ve seen is that the offense is effective and that Jalen Hurts is good. We’ve seen issues with the defensive line and some lapses in coverage. What we know is that Sirianni has no direct effect on either of those things this year, and what we know is that he’s the one guy who has made all of the decisions every single year of his tenure. 

Frank continued, "The one thing that hasn’t changed, the biggest common denominator, is Sirianni, and when we start to assign blame for yet another preposterous nightmare Eagles loss, that’s where we have to start. Because his job right now is setting the culture, preparing the football team, making the big decisions that set the tone for what we see on the field. And what we’ve seen on the field way too often lately is disastrous.”

Sirianni is the one to blame for the Eagles’ collapse in 2023 and he’s the one to blame for the continuation of that spiral in 2024. He’s the one predominant constant in all of this.

Eagles news: You can’t play badly if you’re not on the field

If you blinked, you missed it. During the Falcons’ first offensive drive, Jalen Carter wasn’t on the field. Ultimately, it was a five-play drive that saw the Falcons going 20 yards before they punted, but why was the Eagles' once-touted powerhouse technically not starting?

Jeff McLane of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Carter didn’t start as a punishment because he was, “late for something team-related last week.” There are a few things you can take away from this and one of them is potentially an overreaction to something small and relatively petty. 

Firstly, this seems like something you go through pledgeship when you’re joining a frat. If you’re late for a meeting, a pledge master can punish you, but that might fall on deaf ears. The better thing is to punish your pledge brothers while you watch.

You messed up so now you have to witness your friends and the people you spend the most time with, suffer. It’s kind of sociopathic, but it’s undoubtedly effective.

Now, the issue here is that this isn’t college; this is the National Football League. Keeping the best players off the field hurts everyone and could derail a game. Luckily (depending on how you look at it), Carter’s punishment didn’t derail the game. It was his time on the field and consistent one-on-one losses to Chris Lindstrom that helped derail the game. 

We know that Vic Fangio is an old-school guy and that he’s had issues in the recent past with losing the patience and trust of his defensive players. This whole thing certainly fits in with Fangio’s M.O.

Second (and hopefully this isn’t the case), this could be an indictment of where the Eagles’ defensive line room is at. Fletcher Cox was a leader in the Eagles’ locker room, and the second he retired, the pass rush went to hell and now players are showing up late to meetings, practices, or whatever “something team-related” means. This could be an issue with the lack of established leadership.

Or maybe his tardiness was completely out of his hands. Maybe Jalen just got stuck in traffic. Maybe he went a little hard on shrimp fajitas the night before and didn’t take his peppermint oil and Imodium in the morning. It could be either of those things and this is all just getting blown out of proportion. 

Eagles news: A.J. Brown and the hampered hammy

The news about A.J. Brown missing the Week 2 game broke over the weekend, and the first real update that we got was from ESPN’s Lisa Salters during the Monday Night Football broadcast. Pretty early on, she was talking about A.J.’s injury, and she said A.J. “does not think it’s too serious, he does expect to miss a couple of weeks.”

A “couple of weeks” in football words means ‘more than just two weeks’ and that is going to fall in line with the Eagles’ schedule. Keep in mind the Eagles early bye week in Week 5.

A.J. missed the Week 2 game and he’s probably going to miss the Week 3 game. If that’s the case, then it would be yet another case of coaching malpractice for Sirianni to allow A.J. to play in Week 4. Typically, if a player is on the verge of coming back from an injury and the bye week is in sight, they will keep that player out until after the bye. 

Initially, it looked like the early bye was going to be a detriment to the Eagles’ season, but given the way things are going and how they south they could easily go over the next few weeks, it could be a good spot for the team to hit a reset button and get their elite playmaker back.

Stay positive. Think about the growth Jalen Hurts is going to have while A.J. is out. He can stack some good games and overcome the acclimation period of a new offensive scheme without his biggest weapon. Think about how sick it’s going to be in Week 6 when he can operate this offense with his eyes closed and can chuck 50-50 balls downfield to his best friend. That’ll be awesome.