So Nick Sirianni may have thought it a good idea to pump up himself and his football team by pumping a fist or two at a heckling crowd of fans attending a too-close-for-comfort win over the Cleveland Browns Sunday at the Linc, but by Monday his opinion seemed to have changed a bit.
Saying he had yet to speak to Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, Sirianni still managed to issue an apology of sorts during a Zoom call with team media Monday afternoon.
This, of course, was after plenty of criticism had been levied his way on social media outlets, newspaper columns, radio shows and even by team alumni who always manage to be around to let their voices be heard somewhere.
“What I was really doing was trying to bring energy (and) enthusiasm yesterday,” Sirianni said. “And I’m sorry and disappointed about how my energy was directed at the end of the game. My energy should be all in on coaching, motivating, and celebrating with our guys. … I’ve got to have better wisdom and discernment of when to use that energy, and that wasn’t the time. We have the best fans in the world. There is no place like this. They show up and show out no matter where we are: Brazil, Arizona, it doesn’t matter … New Orleans.
“In that game, too, it was loud. I thought it was really loud, energetic. And those two false starts that the Browns got that forced a field goal (late in the fourth quarter) instead of — who knows, they’re fourth-and-8 at the 8-yard line, and then they get a penalty and don’t go for it on fourth-and-13 — who knows how that would’ve gone? So, our fans brought the energy, brought the passion, brought the juice. Yeah, that is my answer to that.”
Oh.
The Browns did kick a field goal there, with 3:54 remaining in regulation, to pull to within 20-16. They’d never get another chance to make up for that coaching mistake of not trying to tie the game.
The Eagles, who haven’t closed games out consistently since the first half of last season, did so this time. They used a couple of superb Jalen Hurts runs, a pass to Jahan Dotson for a second first down of the series, then a 40-yard bomb that A.J. Brown wrenched away from Cleveland cornerback Greg Newsome right out of the two-minute warning.
That put the ball on the Cleveland 12, and with the Browns unable to stop the clock Hurts took three knees to the victory.
Since a win is a win, the fans — who had voiced their displeasure quite prolifically at several points of the game earlier — responded loudly in kind. But that seemed to give the 43-year-old head coach a reason to wag his finger and stick his tongue out (figuratively, that is) at a section of stands behind his team’s bench.
In his subsequent post-game press conference, which was by some measures slightly on the bizarre side, he pulled his three children up on stage with him and talked emotionally of how much he loved the game, his family and everything in-between.
He also briefly addressed his on-field behavior at game’s end by saying, “When our crowd cheers for us, we thrive off of them. We hear them when they boo. We don’t necessarily like it. I don’t think that’s productive for anybody. When they cheer for us and we’ve got them rolling, we love it.”
Imagine that, a Philadelphia sports figure saying he doesn’t like it when the fans boo.
Hurts has heard at least a few of those in his time here. And after helping his team pull out what for all intents and purposes had to be a must-win game — to avoid embarrassment, at least — he tried to couch Sirianni’s crowd control act as him just “being himself.”
“I didn’t see anything, but I encouraged him to be himself, and so that’s who he is,” Hurts said. “It’s just a reassurance of, you know, we trust who you are. We trust where you are as a coach, and we know we can build with you. So it’s about doing it together. It’s about doing it together, you know. And I think for him, I think any leader, it’s about a vision and trusting in that vision.”
Clearly, however, whatever vision Sirianni holds for his players, he let his frustration with a game that almost went wrong, and with fans who seemed to revel in that, get the best of him. So the media and the ex-jocks who act like media responded in kind Sunday night and Monday. Apparently, so did Eagles management.
Whether it came via an inter-office email, heart-to-coach talk or a brick through the office window, we won’t know.
According to Sirianni on Monday, he had yet to talk to the owner. At least not after the blowback from his fire-at-the-fans act.
“Mr. Lurie and I talk every time after the game. I haven’t talked to him yet today, but I know how supportive Mr. Lurie has been through everything,” Sirianni said. “There are play calls in the game you go through and game management things you go through and say, ‘At the time, I thought this was the right thing,’ and then you evaluate everything.
“You evaluate the way the players played. You evaluate the things that you did as a coach to get them ready to play, or the calls that you made, or the management of the game that you did. You do the same thing with other things, which this one is.”
