Nick Sirianni will be back on the sideline for the Philadelphia Eagles in 2024. Still, according to a source from ESPN, both owner Jeffrey Lurie and general manager Howie Roseman had varied degrees of interest in replacing him with Bill Belichick early this offseason.
“There was chatter in league circles that Philadelphia and Belichick could be a match,” ESPN’s Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham wrote. “Despite some owners and executives believing the game had passed Belichick by, the Eagles felt he still had his fastball.”
After the Eagles’ second-half collapse from a perch atop the NFC to ultimately losing in the Wild Card round, on the road, to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Wickersham and Van Natta report that Roseman made a phone call to “check-in” on Belichick after the six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach and the New England Patriots parted ways back in January.
Likewise, Lurie evaluated the choices between bringing Belichick to Philadelphia against the tremendous undertaking that moving away from Sirianni would be, despite a tragically poor finish to the 2023 season.
“You’ll have to start over again,” a source with firsthand knowledge of the Eagles’ thinking told ESPN. “Who would replace him? He hasn’t had a strong record of producing coaches. They were scared that he’ll have changed everything and every person, and [then] you’ll be beginning from scratch again. He didn’t demand those changes, but they felt like, if we hire him, we have to give everything to him and trust how he does it.”
Belichick is just 15 victories shy of surpassing Don Shula as the winningest NFL head coach of all time, and, according to ESPN, would have interest in managing the Eagles, Dallas Cowboys or New York Giants in 2025.
The Eagles have hired two new coordinators and expended big dollars in free agency to upgrade the seasoned talent on the roster ahead of what may prove to be a key year for Sirianni’s future.
It is interesting wondering what the 2025 season may look like if the Eagles deteriorate even further, two years out from a Super Bowl trip, and Belichick remains available.
Jeffrey Lurie’s Vote of Confidence to Nick Sirianni Sirianni enjoys a 34-17 record since becoming the Eagles’ head coach in January 2021, with a Super Bowl berth and three postseason appearances on his resumè.
Despite what Lurie dubbed a “extremely disappointing” finish to the 2023 campaign, Sirianni will be back in Philadelphia in 2024.
During the NFL Annual Meeting, Lurie revealed that the decision to bring Sirianni back was taken after arduously examining what went wrong.
“We go through a very, very intensive process after every single season,” Lurie told reporters from The Ritz-Carlton Orlando resort during the NFL Annual Meeting. “This season was no different. Extremely sad finale to the season, the last five, six games. Extremely disheartening to me, very frustrating for all of us.
“But what we do is, and I insist on this, is there’s no recency bias, there’s no latency bias, there’s no bias. Take a really close look at precisely what the entire season looked like, what the entire history has been over the previous few years for our organization, for our team and listen.”
Despite failing to live up to expectations, and even if Belichick was available, Lurie still believes Sirianni is the best coach for the group Roseman has built.
“A very disappointing ending but I don’t take light 31-7 in the National Football League. That’s extraordinary,” Lurie told reporters. “And so the ingredients that I’ve always seen with Nick are very obvious: The capacity to connect, the ability to be real, amazing work ethic, high football IQ. All the reasons that he was hired in the first place have been almost heightened in the first three years because they’ve been tremendously successful and yet that doesn’t ever take away from the hard look at the disappointment and frustration when it ended.
“So I don’t mean to diminish that in the slightest because I don’t. I live that and I care. So every part of why we were not able to be resilient as we thought enters into that analysis.”
Don’t Expect Eagles to ‘Reach’ During NFL Draft
If Roseman and the Eagles had an offseason “checklist” of needs to address, nearly all of them would be crossed off by the franchise’s bold actions during free agency.
Saquon Barkley emerges as an upgrade at running back, linebackers Devin White and Zack Baun just might change a roster problem into a position of strength, and the receiving corps is deeper today than it was when the Eagles walked off the field in Tampa Bay to conclude a terrible 2023 season.
After a hectic free agency, Roseman says the Eagles won’t need to draft primarily on addressing a hole this year.
“What we try to do to the best of our abilities is go into the draft trying to fill as many needs as we possibly can through free agency, so we can be open to the best players in the draft,” Roseman told reporters.
The Eagles have gotten major accolades for being able to effectively upgrade the roster while keeping significant cap room. Now, Roseman and Philadelphia have the ability to add youthful talent and depth across the roster at the draft.
