National Football League

Jeffrey Lurie faces big decision: Should Nick Sirianni take fall for Eagles' collapse?

Published Jan. 16, 2024 6:23 p.m. ET

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 slide that we had. It's a wild business we're in. Nobody's safe."

Nick Sirianni losing the locker room led to Eagles turmoil

There are many reasons why Sirianni might not be safe. One big one is what might be an unprecedented pool of coaching candidates available. The field is filled with some of the biggest names in the industry — Bill Belichick, Jim Harbaugh, Pete Carroll and Mike Vrabel — plus an impressive group of younger offensive minds, headlined by the Lions' much-coveted offensive coordinator, Ben Johnson. If Lurie still believes his team is built to win now, it could be hard to pass on a group like that.

But first he'd have to conclude that Sirianni isn't the right guy to get the job done anymore. And there are some good reasons for him to be skeptical.

Perhaps the biggest is this: It's not clear at all that Jalen Hurts, the Eagles' $255 million quarterback, has Sirianni's back. Hurts has reportedly been unhappy with the direction of the offense all season long, and he's often appeared frustrated on the sidelines. Then on Monday night, given a chance to endorse Sirianni after the painful loss, Hurts didn't exactly sound enthusiastic.

When asked if he wanted Sirianni to return, Hurts said "I didn't know he was going anywhere." When he was told there was speculation about his job security, Hurts said "I didn't know that." And when asked if he still had confidence in Sirianni, Hurts said "I have a ton of confidence in everyone in this building."

It's hard to know if Hurts was being purposely quiet and cryptic or just wasn't in a talkative mood. But other players offered far stronger support to their coach.

Even if he had Hurts' support, though, there are other lingering questions about Sirianni — like his choice of a staff. A year ago, Lurie had high praise for Sirianni's staff, which included Shane Steichen as his offensive coordinator and Jonathan Gannon as his defensive coordinator. He even praised the way Sirianni went about replacing them during the offseason.

Did the Eagles quit in wild-card loss to Bucs?

But a team source said that Lurie, like many in the organization, has soured on his choices. In fact, one team source said that if Sirianni was allowed to keep his job, Lurie and general manager Howie Roseman would likely insist that he fire both his coordinators, if he wasn't planning to do it anyway.

Sirianni already demoted defensive coordinator Sean Desai late in the season and handed the play-calling over to senior defensive assistant Matt Patricia, though the defense only got worse from there.

There is an internal belief that he made a big mistake hiring Desai from outside the organization while passing over popular defensive backs coach Dennard Wilson, who immediately left to take the same job with the Baltimore Ravens. They could fix that by hiring Wilson to replace Patricia and Desai.

And there has been a lot of frustration with offensive coordinator Brian Johnson's play-calling late in the season — including his pass-happy approach against the Bucs even though Hurts was playing with a dislocated finger on his throwing hand and without No. 1 receiver A.J. Brown. Johnson was Hurts' choice to succeed Steichen when he left, but there's some speculation that relationship has soured too.

One team source said Hurts audibled and freelanced more frequently late in the season, and that he and Johnson rarely seemed to be on the same page. Hurts regressed badly during the six-game slide, throwing just six touchdown passes with five interceptions. And the Eagles got away from their dangerous run-pass option attack, as Johnson shied away from the running game in general. In fact, Hurts unbelievably had just one carry in the loss to the Bucs, and that didn't appear to be a designed run.

None of that reflects well on the head coach, who could have stepped in and changed the approach on either side of the ball at any time.

But the biggest issue for Sirianni is still the obvious: He wasn't able to stop a slide that lasted seven weeks. It was never going to be easy to repeat as NFC champs and keep their energy all the way up to a second straight Super Bowl. The Eagles wouldn't be the first team to hit a post-Super Bowl wall or suffer the dreaded "Super Bowl hangover." But since December, they sounded like a team that expected they'd simply be able to turn everything on when it mattered, that as bad as they were playing it would all work out.

Sirianni sounded convinced that would happen too. Of course, it never did.

"Obviously, we were in a big slide, and any time that's the case I always look at myself first," Sirianni said. "I didn't do a good enough job. It was almost like we couldn't get out of the rut we were in, and that's all of us. We'll have to look ourselves in the mirror and accept that and find answers, find solutions."

"But obviously, when you start 10-1 and you get into what will happen for us, the expectations were high. We fell into a skid. So I'll look at everything. I'll obviously look at the play calling, I'll look at the scheme, I'll look at practices. I'll look at everything."

So will Lurie and Roseman. And they will surely do something, because the collapse was too dramatic and too painful to excuse.

"It's embarrassing when you start 10-1 and lose six of seven," Lane Johnson told reporters after the game on Monday night. "We had six weeks to tell you how we were going to fix it, we didn't do s—t. It's the first time I've ever been in this kind of position and I never want to be in this position again."

Neither do the Eagles, which is why Lurie is now facing one of the biggest moments of his nearly 30-year tenure as the team's owner. And only he knows if he wants to give Sirianni a chance to fix the mess he made, or if he plans to bring in someone else to clean it up.

Ralph Vacchiano is the NFC East reporter for FOX Sports, covering the Washington Commanders, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.