In 2021, there were seven rookie head coaches in the NFL. One of them didn’t even make it through the season (Urban Meyer went 2-11 with a few off-field incidents in Jacksonville). Another was fired shortly after the season ended (David Culley in Houston, though he never had much of a chance given the Texans’ current situation.
Nick Sirianni is the only one who made the playoffs.
Perhaps the most impressive part of that feat is that the Eagles were slow to fire Doug Pederson after the 2020 season and were subsequently the last team to begin searching for a new head coach. By the time Philadelphia was compiling their list of names, other teams were already honing in on their final selections and finalizing contract details. Howie Roseman and Jeffrey Lurie didn’t even get the chance to talk to some of the “hottest” names available.
According to a recent story from Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer, though, the Eagles weren’t just scrambling to catch up. They took a somewhat novel approach to their coaching search:
And because of all of that—and that the Eagles didn’t plan on a coaching search in the first place—Philly’s brass had to resolve to do things a little differently. So was hatched a simple premise that would guide the next few weeks for the team. They looked to approach their position not as the last team to the market in 2021, but the first team looking at diving into the ’22 candidate pool.
Nick Sirianni had never interviewed for a head coaching position before, and he wasn’t one of the names regularly rattled off by NFL analysts and reporters while discussing the seven vacancies after the 2020 season. From the outside, Sirianni seemed like an odd, random, perhaps even desperate, choice when the news first came out that he would be meeting with the Eagles. But for Howie Roseman and Jeffrey Lurie, this wasn’t random at all.
They had been hearing about Nick Sirianni for years.
When Colts head coach Frank Reich was Doug Pederson’s offensive coordinator in Philadelphia, he often raved about Nick Sirianni:
The first piece for the Eagles was the background they had on the Colts’ OC in the first place, and it went well beyond what they gathered on the run last January. Their old offensive coordinator, Frank Reich, was Sirianni’s boss in Indy, and Reich raved about Sirianni in his two years with the Eagles, telling those in the building that Sirianni would be his first hire when he got his shot as a head coach—a promise he followed through on in 2018.
So, when the Eagles front office began researching candidates, they already had a familiar name at the front of their minds. Sirianni’s background and resume were also appealing, but Reich is the reason they had his name on their list, to begin with.
Things move and change quickly in the NFL, but Sirianni’s first season with the Eagles is considered a success for many reasons. On top of making the playoffs, Sirianni managed to avoid a collapse after a slow start to the season and successfully reinvented the team’s offensive identity on the fly en route to leading the NFL in rushing. It wasn’t perfect, but everyone in the building is buying in, and that may be the most important factor in today’s NFL.
And the Eagles have their old friend Frank Reich, who just suffered a late-season collapse in his first season with former-Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz under center in Indianapolis, to thank.
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Mike Maher is the editor and publisher of The Birds Blitz and Juiced Ball Era. Follow him on Twitter @mikeMaher and @TheBirdsBlitz and check out his Eagles news archive for all of his latest stories about the Eagles and the NFL.
