The Philadelphia Eagles Are Chasing Their Own Standard, Not Opponents

For most of the Philadelphia Eagles’ history, trekking into New England in the rain and ruining the Patriots’ home opener, winning 25-20 to begin the season on a winning note, would be cause for celebration.

But this is an Eagles franchise that has gotten used to success. Philadelphia is 7-1 in Week 1 games since 2016. Nick Sirianni is now 3-0 as Eagles head coach in openers. Winning is the given.

So when the game lists dangerously deep into the fourth quarter, with uncharacteristic mistakes from Sirianni and quarterback Jalen Hurts alike, the postgame tone is more concerned than most teams would be after sending a sellout Gillette Stadium crowd on hand to celebrate Tom Brady home unhappy.

“That team, shoot, Bill Belichick-coached team, it’s going to be well-coached, and I thought that’s exactly what it was,” Sirianni told assembled reporters following the game on Sunday. “Now was it our cleanest performance offensively? No. We have a lot of mistakes to clean up and we have got a short time to do so. But shoot, I thought that we just didn’t finish some drives. We got in a rut a little bit in the second quarter and didn’t finish some drives late in the game.”

Sirianni himself was forced to burn a timeout in the second quarter, the Eagles not ready for the snap. It is the kind of attention to detail that has driven Philadelphia to so much success during the Sirianni era, and it was the part of Sunday’s game that seemed to bother him the most as he reflected on it.

“I hate that,” Sirianni said. “I hate that. It was operation that we need to clean up. You’re not going to come out and play your cleanest game. We talked about it an awful lot but we had some mistakes and that’s on us as coaches. Any time you have to burn a timeout like that with the guys down the field, because we didn’t start as coaches communication first and that’s always, always – don’t look at anybody else but me in that. Don’t look at Sean Desai; don’t look at the defensive coaches; don’t look at the offensive coaches; don’t look at the special teams coaches. That’s always on me because it starts with me telling them, hey, we are kicking it; hey, we are punting it; hey, we are going for a field goal. That’s always – any time something like that that happens, it’s on me… So I’m kicking myself about that and I’m going to make sure that I’m working my butt off to fix that.”

For Sirianni, the process is always one he’s interested in tweaking as he receives more information. And the rust Jalen Hurts showed, after not playing in the preseason, appears to have piqued his curiosity about his preseason plans in the years to come.

“I’ll definitely reevaluate some of the preseason stuff next year,” Sirianni said. “You know, I know they played the first two years that we were here, they only played one series against the Jets in 2022. Maybe I should have played him a series or two this preseason, and I already wrote that in my notes. I’m constantly self-evaluating myself. And I’m not promising anything, and I know y’all will remember this conversation and play it, and that’s okay. But I have to – I’ll re-evaluate that. You know, second thought, if I had to do it over again right now, I would say, yeah, I would have played starters one or two drives in the preseason. But next year will be a new thing with new situations and new everything, so I’m not worrying about that right now. I’m just got it in my notes to think about right now though.”

There were plenty of bright spots in, and this should be reiterated, a season-opening win on the road at New England. Jalen Carter, this season’s first-round pick, recorded a sack in his first regular season pro game, while last year’s first round pick, Jordan Davis, had six tackles.

“Yeah, we had a call that we had run in,” Carter said of his sack, which came on a critical third-down play. “We executed the call and because of the pressure from the other guys, the quarterback stepped up in the pocket and happened to go right into my hands. It felt good.”

Still, the Eagles’ dean in the locker room, Jason Kelce, graded his unit on the offensive line “not up to our standard” and sounded the warning, with the Eagles facing a tight turnaround, next playing the Minnesota Vikings at home on Thursday night.

“It’s always good to win, but it’s not good to play like that and we are going to put a lot of work in to make corrections,” Kelce told reporters. “We have a short week so it’s going to be sped up a bit. I think you are always happy to win but you know we need to play a lot better than this if we are going to reach the potential and level of play we want this year.”