Nick Sirianni deserves credit for how good the Eagles have become

Lane Johnson recently said something worth considering. It wasn’t necessarily the most brilliant or insightful observation to ever pass anyone’s lips. In fact, Johnson himself laughed at the matter-of-factness of his reaction when someone asked him to gauge the mood in the Eagles’ locker room compared to last postseason.

“Well,” the All-Pro right tackle said, “we’re not on a six-game losing streak or whatever it was.”

Then Johnson continued with a nod of recognition of the legitimacy of the question.

“The momentum is definitely on our side this year,” he said. “I feel like we’re coming together stronger than we were last year. The team was kind of in such disarray going into the playoffs.”

Clutter is a strong word. It’s not often you hear it in an NFL locker room. That Johnson felt comfortable citing it might be the best testament to how far the Eagles have come in the last five or six months.

Heading into Sunday’s NFC wild-card game against the Green Bay Packers, the second-seeded Eagles look so stable that it’s easy to forget how tenuous things felt after last season’s playoff loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The anonymous person reports on the quarterback’s dissatisfaction. The owner’s decision to let the head coach toss around in the wind for a week before confirming that he would indeed remain head coach. The dismissal of both coordinators. All of this presaged an offseason in which Jalen Hurts and Nick Sirianni looked and sounded like runaway trains, one heading east, the other heading west, bound to collide or throw everyone off course.

” READ MORE: There’s no question that the Eagles are the most talented team in the NFC at every position but one (or two).

It’s funny how quickly things change, how quickly memories erase and reset themselves. The Eagles were several weeks — maybe even months — into the season when everyone seemed content to accept that Sirianni would at least have another full season. Now here they are, in the playoffs for the fourth straight year, winners of 14 games for the second time in three years, their head coach with a .706 regular season winning percentage, which ranks fifth all-time behind Guy Chamberlin. John Madden, Vince Lombardi and George Allen. The quarterback has been a model citizen in words and deeds, the numbers are far from MVP level, but he’s also exactly what the Eagles need: a career-best completion percentage of 68.7, a career-best quarterback rating of 103.7 and an efficiency that is off the charts.

Things are good. Surprisingly good. So good that I can’t help but feel like we don’t give Sirianni enough credit for how good they are. Inertia and talent only get you so far in the NFL. It’s hard to believe that a team can win 70% of its regular-season games over four seasons – with three different players on offense and four on defense – and a head coach who brings negative value.

Throughout training camp and the regular season, Sirianni was constantly asked the same question: What are you doing here? It rarely seemed to bother him. Now that these questions have been silenced, he would have every right to throw the question in our faces again while pointing to his file.

You wanted to know what I’m doing here? The.

“From freshman year to now, he’s more or less the same guy,” wide receiver DeVonta Smith said. “He preaches the same things, the same details, being together and things like that, and I think that’s why we improve the way we are.”

Admittedly, that could change in a few days. There is hardly a greater coaching sin than losing 14-3 at home in the wildcard round. Andy Reid lasted as long as he did not because his early regular seasons looked like Sirianni’s, but because they never ended earlier than the NFC Championship Game. A coach accumulates his political capital in the postseason. So far, the Eagles have one Super Bowl appearance and two one-and-dones. Maybe ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler’s report a week ago wasn’t so strange. Maybe people around the league are right to wonder whether Sirianni would survive a playoff collapse.

That won’t happen this week. I’m pretty confident about that. Jordan Love throws with his back foot too often. Cornerback Jaire Alexander is out. The Eagles are home. This is more of a collapse than a loss.

Next week? If the opponent is the Bucs or the Los Angeles Rams, it will be a tougher match than many believe. If it’s the Minnesota Vikings, there’s another championship game coming up. That’s my best guess anyway.

” READ MORE: Packers, Bucs, Lions… the path to the Super Bowl is much more difficult than in 2017 or 2022

As for Sirianni, I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t even know if I can sit here and tell you definitively what it is should hold. Coaching in the NFL is inherently a temporary business. This time last year, Shane Steichen was so highly regarded as a coach that people wondered aloud if he had been the mastermind of the operation during the Eagles’ run to the Super Bowl in 2022. The phenomenon was similar to what Doug Pederson encountered following the departure of Frank Reich after the Eagles won their first Lombardi Trophy during the 2017 season. Now Steichen is on the hot seat in Indianapolis and Reich is no longer the coach. Things change quickly, whether justified or not.

I know one thing. Wherever the Eagles go, Sirianni deserves a lot of credit for where they are right now. They are happy. They are healthy. You are confident.

You are in an array state.