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The Eagles really needed Sunday. And the reason why—as their second-year coach, Nick Sirianni, saw it—was because the two games they just played without quarterback Jalen Hurts, back-to-back losses to the Cowboys and Saints, really surfaced some warts that might have been otherwise masked through a 13–1 start.
“Here’s exactly what my message was all week—,” Sirianni told me Sunday night. “Here’s what I did, .
“Then I have players that are calling me and saying the same thing, like, this wasn’t good enough. That’s super healthy, because what you have there is accountability by everybody. You have everybody looking at themselves in the mirror first, saying where they screwed up, how they’re gonna get better from it. We’re gonna talk through it together, and that’s super healthy.”
On Sunday, Hurts returned. The Eagles beat a Giants team that was playing without a slew of starters, 22–16. And it wasn’t perfect by any measure.
But, it stopped momentum that was pushing in the wrong direction, it got Hurts’s rust off ahead of the playoffs and, more than anything else, if only flashes, reminded the Eagles of just how they can be. Which, as it turns out, was really the focus of the entire week, because as Sirianni and his staff saw it, the last time the best version of Philly took the field was the last time the Eagles saw the Giants, nearly a month ago at the Meadowlands.
And the problem since, of course, started with Hurts’s sprained shoulder, which took him out of the past two games, and really did a number on him the week before that, too.
“What he did in Chicago was Michael Jordan–type s—, to be quite honest with you,” Sirianni says. “What he did in Chicago to finish that game and will us to a win was Michael Jordan–type s—. For him to play through that, it was pretty incredible. He had to fight through it today, too. It was tough. He was hurting. It was pretty remarkable what he had to do to go through and get ready to play.”
It was bad enough to where, Sirianni conceded afterward, he probably wouldn’t have played Hurts in another circumstance. “Obviously, if we would have taken care of business,” he says, “then he probably wouldn’t have played.” That, of course, is in large part because the staff would’ve rested other starters, and they weren’t about to put Hurts out there surrounded with backups.
The starters weren’t going to sit this one out, because, for the third consecutive week, Philly was playing for home field advantage throughout the playoffs.
It just, like we said, had happened to be a while since they looked like the No. 1 seed, which is why Sirianni tried to spend the week reminding them of who they are. On Wednesday he showed the players clips of Muhammad Ali in “The Rumble in the Jungle” to illustrate how the legendary boxer was in a tough fight, but remained supremely confident in who he was as a fighter. On Friday, Sirianni showed them the clip, laced with LL Cool J’s “I’m Bad” with Jordan scoring 63 on the Celtics at the Boston Garden in the 1986 NBA playoffs.
And, finally, on Saturday night, Sirianni showed them a video that mashed up Eagles highlights from earlier in the year with Jordan’s iconic night at the Garden, as if to send them the message, .
“The message was, ,” Sirianni says. “And I said all that with this: . We just got to play like that more consistently each week. We didn’t play up to our standard in the last two weeks. That was the whole message of the week, playing up to our standard and playing up to our identity of what we want to be.”
Through the first half, that box was checked. The Eagles led 16–0 at halftime; they had 13 first downs to the Giants’ six and held a 187–77 edge in scrimmage yards. Things evened out a bunch in the second half, but the downturn was full of correctable stuff, and Philly already had what it needed, if it only came in flashes.
“They knew exactly who they were,” Sirianni says. “Bad game, bad momentum, bad whatever. They knew who they were, they knew what their identity was, and they knew they were, pardon my language, bad motherf—–s.”
Next up will be a game on Jan. 22 or 23 in Philly, and the extra bye week will give Sirianni and his coaches the chance to gather, the head coach said affectionately, like his brother Jay and the Southwestern Trojans staff might on a Friday night back in the day, in a way NFL staffs don’t often have the chance.
And as he looked around the room—a couple of hours after the win—seeing offensive coordinator Shane Steichen, pass-game coordinator Kevin Patullo and tight ends coach Jason Michael close by at Steichen’s suburban house, was a pretty nice reminder, too, of the chance they have in front of them, after (finally) bringing home that 14th win.
“You got a little bit of time to dig yourself in that mud,” he says. “That’s healthy. But then there’s got to be a switch that flips and says, . Because we are. We’re a good football team, and there’s gotta be a switch that flips and says, . And it’s not blind faith on why we’re good, or blind confidence of why we’re good. It’s built up over the year.”
With the hope being that now, after Sunday, they’re back to where they were before. And maybe, just maybe, Hurts has some of that Jordan stuff left in him.
