Ralph Vacchiano
NFC East Reporter
It would have been unthinkable that Nick Sirianni’s job was in any kind of jeopardy just two months ago. It hadn’t even been a year since he took the Philadelphia Eagles to Super Bowl LVII. They were 10-1 and looked like they were rolling to the NFC championship again.
The collapse that came next was unfathomable and took the entire Eagles organization by surprise right up until the anticlimactic ending on Monday night in a humiliating, 32-9 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the first round of the playoffs. There will be months of internal discussions needed to figure out how it all went so wrong so fast, how the defending NFC champs could lose six of their last seven games.
But before the soul-searching begins, there is one big question facing Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie:
Is Sirianni to blame?
Only the 72-year-old Lurie knows how he’ll answer that question in the coming days, but multiple people in the Eagles organization are at least bracing for the possibility that a coaching change is coming. It wouldn’t be unprecedented to fire a coach one season after a trip to the Super Bowl. The Denver Broncos did it to John Fox after his team went 12-4 in 2014 and lost in the divisional playoffs, one year after a Super Bowl trip.
But it would be a bold and risky move regardless to jettison a coach who took over a team that went 4-11-1 the year before he arrived and has produced winning records and playoff berths in each of his three seasons, going 27-11 (including the playoffs) in the last two years.
It’s just not unthinkable anymore.
“I’m not thinking about that,” Sirianni said after the game. “I’m thinking about all the guys in that locker room that put their heart and soul into this. I’m not worried about me.”
“I really don’t know what is going to happen,” added Eagles right tackle Lane Johnson. “It’s very frustrating. You see what this team was and you see how the team ended and the…
Source link : https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/jeffrey-lurie-faces-big-decision-should-nick-sirianni-take-fall-for-eagles-collapse
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Publish date : 2024-01-16 23:23:18
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