Eagles’ Sirianni: ‘We’re all accountable, and that’s the only way to get better’

In 2022, the Eagles made the Super Bowl but lost to the Chiefs. Last season, Philly got off to a 10-1 start but lost six of its last seven games, including the playoffs.

The 2023 Philadelphia Eagles crashed and burned, and because of this, the team made changes to its coaching staff. It replaced both its offensive and defensive coordinators, but head coach Nick Sirianni remained. In the spring, Sirianni took full accountability for what happened last season, which he discussed on Wednesday.

“The only way to get better is to really look through the things that you felt like you messed up and get better at them, right?” he said. “It starts with the humility to say, ‘I messed this up, I need to be better at this.’

“If you want a culture of accountability and you’re not being accountable yourself — let me rephrase this. If I want Taylor Sirianni to be accountable — I actually just talked about this to our staff today– If I want Taylor Sirianni to be accountable and she sees me blaming things on other people at all times, I’m raising a child that’s not going to be accountable. Well, it’s the same thing with a team.

“If I’m not accountable to the things that I mess up, how am I going to expect them to be accountable to what they mess up? So that’s been day one here. That’s just not offseason 2024 going into the ’24 season. That’s been what I’ve tried to do since day one.

“I think that our world is dying for accountability in a world where there are so many things that you can blame things on. I’ve said this before. One of the most proud I’ve ever been of this team is after a loss in the Super Bowl. Everyone was trying to give us an out. The field was really bad, right?

“The response of our players to that, ‘No, they had to play on it too.’ ‘But that call on [CB James] Bradberry, that’s what lost it.’ ‘No, you know, it was a series of plays.’ ‘But what about this?’ And what about that? And what about how,’ — like, it was everybody was trying to hand us an excuse, and they just kept going back to, ‘No, accountability.’

“That’s the culture that we want to have. That’s the family I want to have as accountability, and accountability is just so important. If you don’t have accountability, then you’re not going to get better because you’re not going to recognize the mistakes that you made.

“That’s what we want from this team. Any meeting that we start out that I feel like I made a mistake on, I’m going to make sure I bring it up. It’s not just me up there fixing corrections in front of the team after each practice.

“I’m saying, ‘Hey, [reporter] Eliot [Shorr-Parks], you play wide receiver. You screwed this up. Do you want to play wideout?’ Right? ‘[reporter] Bo, [Wulf] you play quarterback. You screwed this up.’ No. It’s, ‘Hey, Kellen [Moore], this is not the right call.’

“Everybody is accountable. We’re all accountable, and that’s the only way to get better, and I firmly believe that.”

This is not all on Sirianni, but he’s the coach, and as the coach, if things are going well, you get all the credit, but when things fall apart, the coach gets all the blame.

In addition, according to an ESPN report, Sirianni and star quarterback Jalen Hurts did not see eye-to-eye, so that’s another thing that has to be fixed.

In conclusion, if the circumstances of 2023 were to recur in 2024, Sirianni’s job could be on the line. The pressure is squarely on him to set things right.