Eagles coach Nick Sirianni saw it right away.
It was early in the spring when Sirianni showed his team a video of his players walking glumly off the field at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, the red and yellow confetti falling all around them, after the Eagles had just lost to the Kansas City Chiefs 38-35 in the Super Bowl on Feb. 12.
Sure, the video consisted of the high and low points from a thrilling game that the Eagles came 8 seconds, and a holding call, away from possibly winning.
But then Sirianni focused on the confetti in the seconds after Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s game-winning field goal went through the uprights. And this is where Sirianni had everything he needed to know about the mindset his players would take into training camp, which begins Tuesday.
Sirianni didn’t see satisfaction that his team exceeded expectations and reached the NFL’s championship game, giving the Chiefs everything they could handle.
Rather, Sirianni saw anger and a determination to never have that feeling again.
LEGENDS LEAVING?Is this the end for Kelce, Graham, Cox? What Eagles roster might look like without them
CAMP COUNTDOWN:Eagles’ 9 most important: No. 3, how A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith can improve on career year
“I think probably one thing that I feel when you go to a Super Bowl, the people come back (being) overconfident or not as hungry,” Sirianni said. “We didn’t win. I know how hungry our guys are. And our mindset, too, which never changes.”
But Sirianni saw something else.
And for this, he harkened back to his playing days at Mount Union, a Division III national power that won three straight national championships when Sirianni was there from 2000-02. In 1999, when Sirianni was a freshman, the Purple Raiders lost in the national semifinals. The next year, when Mount Union won it all, Sirianni didn’t play much.
Here, Sirianni likens the situation to what 2022 draftees in defensive tackle Jordan Davis and linebacker Nakobe Dean are feeling like. They didn’t play much as rookies. But this season, the Eagles are counting on them to contribute heavily after Pro Bowl defensive tackle Javon Hargrave left in free agency, along with both starting linebackers in T.J. Edwards and Kyzir White.
But that Mount Union experience also explains the mindset for the stars on the team, like quarterback Jalen Hurts, who turned himself into an MVP finalist last season. In the Super Bowl, Hurts threw for 304 yards and ran for 70 more and three touchdowns. Had the Eagles won, Hurts would have been an easy choice for the game’s MVP.
“We would talk all the time about how hungry we were, that it was going to be our opportunity to be involved in that winning,” Sirianni said about his class of freshmen that watched from the sidelines as the Purple Raiders won the first championship in 2000.
“(It) made all the guys (hungry). I can speak about it from both ends. As a guy who was young, I needed to be a part of that. That was a lot of my friends and roommates. And then, by the time we were seniors, and we had won a couple, it was like, we gotta keep this (going).
“I (see) the Super Bowl thing like that … All the Super Bowl did was make us hungry to get back.”
Since then, Hurts signed a five-year contract extension worth as much as $255 million, a record at the time. He’s still a few weeks short of his 25th birthday.
And yet, Hurts said nothing changes with his demeanor or mindset. In fact, he said he approaches this season the same way he did after leading Alabama to the national championship as a true freshman in 2016-17.
“I remember sitting there as 17-year-old kid, 18-year-old kid and saying, ‘my sophomore year starts tomorrow,'” Hurts said. “Nothing changes now. Going into Year 4, hungrier than ever, starving for more.”
It’s the same for stalwarts like center Jason Kelce, defensive end Brandon Graham and defensive tackle Fletcher Cox. All of them could have moved on or retired after last season. For Kelce, it would have been a storybook ending to go out after playing in the Super Bowl against his brother, Travis, a star tight end for the Chiefs, and with his parents becoming national media darlings.
Yet all three decided to return, Cox and Graham most likely for less money than they could have gotten elsewhere.
“Personally, after the Super Bowl, I couldn’t wait to get back,” tight end Dallas Goedert said. “That was the toughest loss I’ve ever had in my career. The only thing I wanted to do from that time on is get back, start this new season.
“I think, if anything, it puts a chip on the entire team’s shoulder.”
The meaning of rock, paper, scissors games and flower pot picture
Sirianni said that’s all manifested in the competition.
Remember how Sirianni was often ridiculed in the media for the rock, paper, scissors games he would play with prospective draftees in April 2021 over Zoom, when face-to-face meetings were forbidden because of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Or the 3-point shooting competitions Sirianni would hold with draftees this past spring? Or the much-ridiculed flower-pot picture he showed his team after a 2-5 start in 2021, signifying that the roots of success were growing underneath the ground, unseen?
It’s all about the competition. And that’s how Sirianni sees the Eagles recovering from the Super Bowl loss and getting back to the NFL’s championship game this season.
“You practice competing the same way you practice a play,” Sirianni said. “You want guys to just have it in their blood to be competitive at all times. That’s what we do. We can’t turn it on and turn it off.”
For this, Sirianni described recently attending a party with his wife and a group of friends. The group started playing different games. Sirianni said he approached it like he would calling a crucial play in the final minutes of a close game.
“I was being overly competitive,’ he said with a laugh. “I’m like (to my wife), ‘You brought me to this game party. You knew what was going to happen.’ And she goes, ‘You’re right. I did know. I knew exactly what was going to happen.'”
Is Hurts competitive enough to improve on an MVP-caliber season when he completed 66.5% of his passes, threw for 3,701 yards and rushed for 760 more. What about wide receivers A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith improving on career years in which they had 1,496 and 1,196 yards receiving, respectively?
Or a defense in which Haason Reddick had a career-high 16 sacks? Or cornerbacks Darius Slay and James Bradberry showing they can still dominate the receivers they cover as they age into their 30s.
SAQUON’S SITUATION:How Eagles always avoid a Saquon Barkley, Giants contract impasse − and still thrive at RB
BEAST OF NFC EAST:NFC East 2023: Which Philadelphia Eagles can statistically lead the division
Why the road back to the Super Bowl is so difficult
And yet, history isn’t on the Eagles side.
In the 57 years of the Super Bowl, only three teams that lost the championship game came back to win it the next season.
The New England Patriots were the last team to do it, falling to the Eagles 41-33 in the 2018 game only to beat the Rams 13-3 the next season. Interestingly enough, after the Eagles won the Super Bowl that year, former Eagles coach Doug Pederson described the team’s mindset as “the new normal,” signifying many championship opportunities to follow.
That didn’t work out. The Eagles had to rally in each of the next two seasons, each time with 9-7 records, just to make the playoffs. Then they cratered in a 4-11-1 disaster that cost Pederson his job and led to the Eagles turning to Hurts after previous quarterback Carson Wentz demanded to be traded.
So yes, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Sirianni saw this on Super Bowl Sunday, and that loss still gnaws at him.
“Am I watching clips from the game when I’m doing our postseason thing and thinking to myself, yelling an obscenity if I see us make a mistake or I see myself make a mistake? Yeah,” Sirianni said. “There have been times I’ve been sitting in that office and an ‘F-bomb’ came out of that office, and someone says, ‘Is everything all right?’
“But to me, it’s very healthy to do that. It’s healthy to … drag yourself through the mud. This is the accountability piece of our program … to get real dirty, and to be like, ‘Oh, I messed that up, or I messed this up’
“But then there’s got to come a time where you get yourself out of the mud, and you realize you’re here for a reason, and you’re confident in your abilities to move on.”
So the Eagles are moving on. The confetti has long been cleaned up. The Eagles are determined to make sure when the confetti falls again, it’s green and white.
Contact Martin Frank at mfrank@delawareonline.com. Follow on Twitter @Mfranknfl.
