Finding Fault
Posted January 16th, 2024 | 12 Comments »Now that the Eagles season is officially over, a new sport is set to take place. The Blame Game. It won’t shock you to find out Nick Sirianni is the star. Everyone is focused on Sirianni and his myriad faults.
You don’t go 1-6 down the stretch with a talented roster because of one person. We need to keep that in mind as we perform an autopsy on the weirdest Eagles season in recent memory. 2020 was close, but you could point to injuries as the biggest factor in that team having a disastrous season. 2023 saw the Eagles as the hottest team and the coldest team in the league with basically the same set of players. That’s hard to do.
Sirianni deserves a ton of blame for the team’s failures. I don’t want to go in-depth on everything. We’ll focus on the big stuff for now. The biggest issue with Sirianni was demoting Sean Desai. The defense was having problems, especially on third downs. But demoting Desai and promoting Matt Patricia? That’s the kind of drastic move you can only make if you are certain it will fix the problems. If it doesn’t work, the head coach looks bad because he’s undermining his DC. It also feels like a panic move and that’s not lost on the players. It doesn’t send them a great message.
Changing coaches can work. It did for the offenses in Pittsburgh and Buffalo. But the guys who lost their jobs had multiple seasons to get things turned around and didn’t. Those head coaches were as patient as they could be before feeling like something drastic had to happen. Desai had 13 games and one of the weakest back sevens in the NFL. That’s hardly the same thing.
Sirianni’s decision did not work, to put it mildly.
While the Eagles offense remained one of the Top 10 units in the league for the season, they struggled down the stretch. The offense was held to 19 or fewer points in 5 of the final 7 games. The last three weeks, teams had success blitzing the Eagles. Sirianni had no answers for that, which drew the ire of anyone and everyone who watched the Eagles play. The Eagles kept doing the same thing, over and over. It kept failing, over and over. Yikes.
Sirianni is supposed to be an offensive guru. The fact he couldn’t come up with answers despite having plenty of talent to work with is a bad look. Really bad.
The other issue with Sirianni is that he couldn’t push the right buttons with this team. He got so much right with the 2022 team and so much wrong with this one. Players underachieved. There were weird vibes all year. Sirianni had to talk to AJ Brown, DeVonta Smith and Dallas Goedert at different points in the season about their lack of touches. Too often the players felt more like 53 independent contractors than one team. There was a lot of celebrating and fun in 2022. That was missing this season.
Sirianni has a lot to answer for.
But he’s not alone. Howie Roseman isn’t without fault. His magical touch from 2022 wasn’t to be found in 2023. He brought back James Bradberry, which made good sense at the time. But Bradberry had an awful season. He had some twilight zone aging deal where instead of going from 29 to 30 he went straight to 47. Teams picked on him all year, no matter who he covered. It is Howie’s job to know when guys are going to get old. He missed the call on Bradberry.
Linebacker proved to be a disaster. Roseman let TJ Edwards walk in free agency and hoped a combination of Nakobe Dean and Nick Morrow could get the job done. Oops.
The plan at safety didn’t work, with Justin Evans getting hurt and Terrell Edmunds struggling. Reed Blankenship had a solid season, but wasn’t enough to make up for the lack of someone good across from him.
Veteran players who joined the team during the season were all disappointing. Bradley Roby didn’t show much interest in tackling and his cover skills didn’t exactly make up for that. Kevin Byard made one high level play in 11 games. Julio Jones didn’t do much. Shaq Leonard was awful. Rashaad Penny couldn’t even get on the field.
There is a bit of randomness and luck that goes into personnel moves, but Howie had too many not work out this season.
Finally, we can’t excuse the players.
- Bad passes
- Fumbles
- Missed blocks
- Dropped passes
- Missed tackles
- Poor gap integrity
- Coverage breakdowns
You don’t expect everyone to be a Hall of Fame player, but you do need guys to execute the basics well. That was a struggle for the Eagles all year long. You can go re-watch the opener vs the Pats and see issues. We thought they would go away. They never did.
You know the old saying that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan? Jeffrey Lurie needs to do a good job of identifying all the dads for this disastrous finish and flawed overall season. There is more than enough blame to go around.
Figuring out who to blame is only part of the equation. The tricky part is then coming up with solutions so 2024 is a better season. If Nick Sirianni doesn’t have some good answers for his bosses, he just might be updating his resume.
_