On the first day of the Philadelphia Eagles’ offseason program, coach Nick Sirianni showed an image of the last time the team was together. The red and yellow confetti from the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory celebration was as apparent for all to see on the big screen in the team’s auditorium on April 24 as it was on the field after the Super Bowl on Feb. 12.
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Sirianni insisted he will not offer steady reminders of the Super Bowl loss this season, when the Eagles fell to the Chiefs after leading by 10 points at halftime. He even suggested that most of the discussion that surfaces within the confines of the team facility will be from outsiders asking about the game. But sometimes what is understood doesn’t need to be explained.
Sirianni is the type of person whose competitive zeal oozes at any moment — from beating the team that fired one of his closest friends to any random afternoon when a basketball is present. If you think he will brush off a loss on the biggest stage in football and flush it away like a starting pitcher is taught to do during the doldrums of August, you probably don’t know Sirianni. Or Jalen Hurts. Or the type of culture the Eagles coach has sought to create.
“It’s OK to use this as motivation. You should use it as motivation,” Sirianni said during a roundtable interview this summer. “But the end goal is not just to say, ‘I’m going there.’ It’s about the process.”
After Sirianni showed the confetti in the team meeting, he quoted a pastor: You can’t admire the results and desire the reward if you don’t embrace the routine that produces the reward.
With that, welcome to the Eagles’ 2023 season. Or at least that’s how he tried to welcome the players and coaches.
The Eagles begin training camp this week as the favorites to win the NFC and with the second-best odds, behind the Chiefs, to win the Super Bowl. That should illustrate the stakes — and expectations — of the season.
“Last year is over,” Hurts said. “Nothing that’s been done prior will get us to where we want to be now. There are a ton of experiences that we definitely documented and deposited in the bank, if you will, to learn from, that we will learn from and have learned from, but it’s a day-by-day thing.”
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Prepare for this talking point on overdrive. It’s a new season. It’s not about last year. Except this is more akin to a television series returning from a cliffhanger finale. Some characters changed. New storylines emerge, but the dramatic arc remains.
“Our goal every day isn’t to come in here to chase the Super Bowl,” Sirianni said. “You hope it gets to that, but it’s to look at the daily increments, right? And how we get better, how we get better, how we get better. … You got to be really good to win. You got to be really good to get to the playoffs even, right? Then you’re gonna have some luck involved in it. So are we doing the things that we can control every single day to put ourselves in position to go win another?”
Here’s something else you’ll hear often this summer: It’s hard to return to the Super Bowl, and history is not favorable to the losing team the next season. In the 57 seasons after the Super Bowl, three teams have won the following year: the New England Patriots in 2018 (after losing to the Eagles); the Miami Dolphins, who went perfect in 1972 after losing to the Dallas Cowboys the previous season; and the 1971 Cowboys, who rebounded from losing to the Baltimore Colts. Five more teams made it back to the Super Bowl the following season. Forty of the 57 teams made it to the postseason. When the Eagles lost the Super Bowl during the 2004 season, they failed to make the playoffs in 2005. When they won the Super Bowl in 2017, they made the playoffs before losing in the divisional round the next season.
“First of all the Eagles are in great hands. They’ve got a good head coach and general manager,” said Andy Reid, who was the coach of the 2004 team and returned to the Super Bowl the 2019 season after winning in 2018 with Kansas City. “So I think they’re in a really good spot. They’ve got a quarterback that I think is tremendous. And that’s a good nucleus just to start with. They’re losing a few players, but they got a number coming back. So I think they’re in good hands. But … we all have to do it. So (last season) is history now. We move on.”
Sirianni’s reference to luck is a fair point because it takes more than a loaded roster and smart coaching staff to play on the season’s final weekend. The Eagles had 22 of 22 starters healthy for the Super Bowl last season and finished third lowest in the league in adjusted games lost by Football Outsiders, indicating how relatively healthy they were in 2022. Even with modified practice schedules to emphasize player health, it’s hard to rely on the team maintaining the same injury luck in a collision sport. General manager Howie Roseman said to “expect the same results as last year would be naïve at a minimum.”
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The Eagles played eight regular-season games last year against opponents that finished with winning records. They have 10 games on the schedule this season against teams that finished 2022 with a winning record, and five made the divisional round of the playoffs. The schedule could prove to be more difficult. The Cincinnati Bengals were one of the best teams in the NFL last season, but they didn’t make it back to the Super Bowl because Kansas City was in their way. Simply said, the odds are against anyone operating with a Super Bowl-or-bust mentality.
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Nonetheless, Sirianni actually explored the “Super Bowl hangover.” He likes to collect information, and he commissioned a study of teams coming off Super Bowls — winners and losers. One trend he found was that teams that failed to return to the postseason had a major disparity in their offensive statistics. The Los Angeles Rams went from No. 8 in offensive DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) in 2021 to No. 23 in DVOA in 2022, failing to make the playoffs after winning the Super Bowl. The San Francisco 49ers went from No. 7 in offensive DVOA in 2019 when they lost in the Super Bowl to No. 20 in 2020 when they missed the playoffs. In both cases, the starting quarterback was injured during the year when the teams missed the postseason. The same was true for the Eagles in 2005 when Donovan McNabb went down.
“If there’s anything that you can take from that, you’ll take it. There might not be anything that I get from it, right? We’ll definitely study it,” Sirianni said. “I think probably one thing that I feel when you go to a Super Bowl the people come back thinking overconfident or not as hungry. We didn’t win. I know how hungry our guys are. And our mindset too, which never changes, truly.”
The story with the Eagles is not simply about how hungry they are. It’s also how harrowed they might be. The way the Eagles lost stung, and it’s not necessarily a wound that quickly heals.
“That was the toughest loss I’ve ever had in my career, and the only thing I wanted to do from that time on is get back, start this season so we could go out there and prove (it),” tight end Dallas Goedert said. “If anything, it puts a chip on the entire team’s shoulder.”
After the Atlanta Falcons lost the Super Bowl following the 2016 season despite a 28-3 lead in the second half, then-coach Dan Quinn consulted with coaches and executives who shared similar stinging championship defeats. The list included Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, Cleveland Guardians baseball manager Terry Francona, San Antonio Spurs general manager R.C. Buford and Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. Asked in June if he had done anything similar, Sirianni said he had not to that point but thought it would be a good idea. The advice was to acknowledge what happened and own it, and then move on and use it as fuel.
Months after the Spurs were seconds from an NBA title before Ray Allen’s miraculous 3-pointer, coach Gregg Popovich brought his coaches together on a retreat and started by watching Game 6 again, according to ESPN. Sometimes, the way to heal a wound is to expose it to air and cleanse it.
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“There’ve been times I’ve been sitting in that office and an F-bomb came out of that office and someone says, ‘Is everything all right?’” Sirianni said.
He had NFL Network on in the background this summer while he sat with his son. Highlights of the Super Bowl came on. Sirianni reacted the way Nick from Haddonfield calling into talk radio would while slamming his chair for effect.
“To me, it’s very healthy to do that,” he said. “It’s healthy to — as Frank Reich used to say to me — drag yourself through the mud. … This is the accountability piece of our program. It’s healthy to drag yourself through the mud. To get real dirty, and to like, ‘Oh, I messed that up.’ But then there’s got to come a time where you get yourself out of the mud and you realize you’re here for a reason and you’re confident in your abilities and to move on. But there is a healthy portion of dragging yourself through the mud because that’s how you get better. ‘What did I screw up? What are the things I didn’t like about what we did?’ … So, of course, I’ve had those with that game. I’ve probably watched that game an obsessive (number) of times.”
During the summer, Sirianni takes walks around his South Jersey neighborhood and ponders what his messages will be to the team in given situations. He won’t have constant reminders of the Super Bowl. But there will be a day when the message must be sent, when he wants to touch a particular nerve.
“Will one of them be staying in the pain? Yeah, probably,” Sirianni said. “I don’t know when the time is right to tell that story. I get a feel for that throughout the week. But of course, you can use it.”
This is similar to Hurts’ message to teammates. He tells them last year is finished, but to learn from it, to use it. This is a new mix of players who must replace seven Super Bowl starters — although when asked what stood out about the offseason moves, he responded with, “(Jason) Kelce’s back” — and that the Eagles must embrace that they’re starting over. But they also must “allow the things you’ve experienced to fuel you.”
“It doesn’t take much to fuel me and motivate me,” Hurts said.
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Kelce told the team website in the spring that “in some ways, it’s going to be harder” because opponents are watching the Eagles even closer. Coaches have an offseason to dissect how Philadelphia excels and will try to counter its innovation and creativity. Kelce warned the team before last season about the perils of getting comfortable and said “expectations are just that: They’re f—ing nothing.” He referenced Clubber Lang in “Rocky III,” with other teams hunting the Eagles every day. He also tried to downplay the hype surrounding the team — and that was when the Eagles were simply coming off a postseason appearance. The expectations of a team coming off a Super Bowl appearance would cast a shadow on William Penn’s cap atop City Hall.
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“In this city, it feels like every year the media thinks we’re really good, we end up being s—ty,” Kelce said then. “And every year the media thinks we’re going to be s—ty, we end up being really good.”
That hype will build even more this year, but in a different way. There can be a been there, done that approach to the regular season. Double-digit wins? Yawn. Division crown? Fine. The Eagles were at that point in the early 2000s, in which a season’s success was (almost unfairly) determined by whether there would be a parade on Broad Street. It’s like the conversation about Nikola Jokic after back-to-back MVPs: What will you do in the playoffs?
This might be one of Sirianni’s biggest challenges. He can’t fast forward to January. There are six weeks of practice and three preseason games. Then a 17-game season. And the Eagles head coach narrows it to even tighter constraints than the cliche “one day at a time.” He tells them, one meeting at a time, one rep at a time.
“I have to find a different way of saying that and living that,” Sirianni said. “I can’t have them turn me off. I have to find creative ways to teach that. Saying that is great. Showing them is better.”
Sirianni said good coaching is when the players know what he’ll say even before he says it. He still hears his father’s messages in his head. As a teenager when he tried taking a shortcut on a chore, his father would tell him, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” Or he would sit on the couch with his father during cold days in Jamestown, N.Y., and the message from his father was, “While you’re up, go get some more wood.” Sirianni does not need to be told to work hard — he hears his dad.
It might work with his players, but the coach cannot control a fan base planning day-before-Super Bowl excursions in Las Vegas already. He can’t convince them to stop wondering what would have happened if Hurts had one final drive, if the flag was not thrown on James Bradberry, if the turf wasn’t so slick. He won’t be able to mollify the hype heading into Week 11 against Kansas City (or Week 13 against San Francisco in an NFC Championship Game rematch, for that matter).
As much as Sirianni will want to move on to this season, it sometimes pops up in unexpected ways. During the final practice of the offseason program, he wore a visor that — seemingly by chance — had the Super Bowl logo embroidered on the side.
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The Eagles cannot outrun history. They can only try to rewrite it.
(Top photo: Cooper Neill / Getty Images)
