The Eagles should win 11 or 12 games this season.
They should.
The depth and personnel are there. The experience, though it took a hit with the retirements of Jason Kelce and Fletcher Cox, is there. The coaching, with the addition of two assertive, respected coordinators in Vic Fangio and Kellen Moore, is there. The schedule, despite an early bye, is more favorable than not.
Everything appears right for the Eagles to win the NFC East for the second time in three years and to make a deep playoff push.
The one dangling caveat is whether head coach Nick Sirianni can return to the coach he was when this team got off to a combined 18-1 start over the first eight games in 2022, and first 11 in 2023. He is 34-17 in his first three years, which is more victories than any previous Eagles coach in that time-frame. He has proven he can win in the NFL—with Shane Steichen and Jonathan Gannon as his coordinators.
But there were signs throughout the 2023 season that something was wrong, and nothing was being fixed. When adversity struck, panic seemed to arrive and spread. And nothing from the commander, Sirianni, appeared to quell the listing.
Even when the problems were blatant.
In Week 8, the glaring fissures on defense allowed Washington 7 of 12 third-down conversions, when the Commanders entered the game converting just 29.41% on third down, which was 31st in the NFL at the time (only the New York Jets were worse). The Eagles suffered two turnovers inside the Washington five, which put them at 13 (They did not turn the ball over 13 times until Week 15 in the Super Bowl 2022 year). The Commanders also amassed 472 yards of offense in an Eagles’ 38-31 victory.
No one seemed to care because the Eagles were 7-1.
They were 10-1 in Week 12, though trends continued, and no one had answers after the Eagles’ 37-34 overtime victory over Buffalo. Defensively, the Eagles gave up what had been at the time a season-high 505 yards of offense to the Bills and Josh Allen.
Alarm, it appears, may have set in after the Eagles’ 33-13 Week 14 debacle in Dallas. That is when the Eagles replaced defensive coordinator Sean Desai with assistant coach Matt Patricia to handle the defensive play calls, a move many believe was made by Jeff Lurie and Howie Roseman than by Sirianni.
Whoever made the decision to replace Desai with Patricia, it seemed to undermine Sirianni, whether he made the choice or not, and set off concerns in the locker room. Who was running the 2023 Eagles? Are the orders coming from Sirianni and the sideline, or from up top in the executive suite? It was interesting what Eagles’ running back Kenny Gainwell went public with on the Javien University podcast a few weeks ago on the Eagles’ 1-6 collapse:
“I think it was a connection piece. Teams like the (Kansas City) Chiefs are well-connected, upstairs and downstairs. Front office and the locker room. Everybody’s connected. When you have a connection, everything just clicks. But when you got guys that aren’t talking to each other, you never know what’s going on...”
What was fact, for everyone to see, was that the 2023 Eagles quit the last two months of the season. Sirianni may have taken more control of the play calling on offense late in the year, pushing out Brian Johnson, who may have complicated the offense for Jalen Hurts.
For the way the Eagles laid down to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the wild card round playoff loss, Sirianni should be grateful that he received a reprieve.
He knows the thin rope he is on this season.
Can Sirianni regain the confidence of his players and restore a winning culture to a flagging team?
Adding a strong locker room presence like Saquon Barkley surely helps, as does not having to babysit first-year coordinators who seemed to do more guessing than being assertive.
Sirianni is well-liked by his players, though there could be more than a few that question how much in command he is, especially with what happened late last season, and with the hiring of control hounds like Fangio and the 35-year-old Moore, who is aspiring to be an NFL head coach (and previously interviewed by the Eagles for the same job Sirianni was hired for).
The puzzle is laid out. The pieces are there to win. It will be up to Sirianni to put them together.
He has before—with Steichen and Gannon.
