The 2023 EAGLES NIGHTMARE---A Playoff Prequel

         As I write this, the last games of the 2023-24 NFL regular season are two days away, and my Eagles are in full meltdown.  Many explanations have been offered for why this has happened, and many of them are at least partially true.  This is my explanation.

 

On December 2, the Philadelphia Eagles were 10 – 1, with wins over Dallas, Miami, Kansas City, Buffalo and the LA Rams.  One month later, on January 2, they had lost four out of five, and had been blown out twice.  They had appeared to be on a path to the Superbowl, or at least to the NFC Championship game, but now they seem much more likely to be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.

 

         The Philly demise would seem to be a sudden and monumental collapse, and that is how it is being treated in the local papers and radio.  “The league caught on.”  “Hurts is injured but is trying to keep it together.”  “Head Coach Sirianni has been unable to adjust to the way other teams are playing the Eagles now.”  Most commentators have blamed the team’s defense, and the Defensive Coordinator was relieved of his play-calling responsibilities two weeks ago.

 

         And, well, it is true the defense has declined (largely as a result of injuries), but it was never world-class to begin with.  It was good enough to get to a Superbowl last year, however, though not quite good enough to win one.

 

         The strength of the team, however, both last year and this, has been the talent on the offensive side of the ball.  With Hurts, DeVonta Smith, A. J. Brown, Dallas Goedert, D’Andre Swift , and a highly-skilled, experienced offensive line, the Eagles had the best offensive squad in the NFL.  (“On paper,” as they say.)   This is not just me saying this.  It was the consensus view among those who know more about such things than I do.  Yet the astonishing thing is that Coach Sirianni and his Offensive Coordinator chose not to use the talent they had.

 

         It was apparent to me and to a few others that even when the Eagles were 10 – 1, they were heading for a fall, simply because the coaches refused to use the talent they had to score points.  The Eagles offense could have scored 40 points against most of the opponents it faced.  They were that good.  Instead, Sirianni and his OC became obsessed with merely possessing the ball.  They fell in love with 19-play drives that take 8 minutes off the clock, as if time of possession (rather than points scored), was the true measure of an offense’s proficiency.  A bizarre folly, but this was Sirianni’s first head-coaching job, and he is surrounded by other very young coaches.  There is no one there who has been around for thirty years and had the prestige to slap Sirianni upside the head.  (“Yo, Nick!  You have A. J. Brown.  Throw the ball to him forty yards down the field and see what happens!”)

 

         The result was that, of those first eleven games, the Eagles only won two of them by double digits.  The rest of them were close, a lot closer than they had to be.    Beat the Patriots 25-20.  Beat Minnesota 34-28.  Beat the Redskins 34-31 in OT.  Lost to the Jets 20-14.  Letting teams like this stick around was ALWAYS going to lead to disaster.  And now it has.

 

         When you have a superior offense, the LAST thing you want is 19-play drives that reduce the number of possessions in the game, yet that was Sirianni’s goal, week after week.  If you reduce the number of possessions, all you do is increase the chance that the weaker team will get lucky and win.  That is why reducing the number of possessions is an underdog strategy.  In the first round of the 1989 NCAA tournament, in the game between #1 seed Georgetown and #16 seed Princeton, it was Princeton that used every second it could (all 45 of them per possession), to slow down the game.  The result was a 50-49 G’town victory in a game in which they were 23-point favorites.

 

         For a football team, the case for speeding up the pace of play and increasing the number of possessions is even stronger than it is in other sports.  One reason for this is that, unlike basketball, the offensive unit and the defensive units are separate squads.  This means that you can, and should, shape the play of the game so as to protect your very expensive offensive skill players from unnecessary mayhem.

 

Put more simply, it is pure idiocy to give a 240-pound defensive lineman nineteen chances to separate your $300-million quarterback’s head from his body.  It makes much more sense to give that low-browed killing machine only three chances per possession to destroy your franchise.   The ideal offensive drive takes three plays, lasts one hundred seconds, covers eighty yards, and scores a touchdown.  There is a place, I suppose, for a three-minute drive that ends in a field goal, but there is a very strong argument that the BEST non-scoring offensive drive takes three plays and ends in a punt. You then sit your billion-dollar offense on the bench, feed them some Gatorade, give them foot massages, and advise them on how best to score when your team gets the ball back.

 

Sirianni, of course, is not the first NFL coach to fall in love with ball-possession football and misunderstand, fundamentally, the nature of the game.  It all started with Bill Parcells.

 

The game that made Parcells a certified genius occurred on January 27, 1991.  This was Superbowl XXV, in which Parcells’s Giants defeated the Buffalo Bills 20-19.

 

The Bills that year featured one of the first no-huddle offenses in the NFL.  They led the league in scoring offense with 428 points.  On the other side, Parcells had a solid team with a good defense, and no real superstars.  This is why the 1990-91 Giants always appear on any list of the “Ten Worst Teams Ever to Win a Superbowl.”

 

In the Superbowl itself, Parcells went full-out Princeton vs. Marv Levy’s Georgetown.  The Giants held the football for 40 minutes and 33 seconds of the game, and sent the Bills to the first of their four consecutive SB defeats when Scott Norwood went ‘Wide Right” in the closing seconds. 

 

(Trivia: a week ago, on December 31, 2023, the 98-year-old Marv Levy attended Buffalo’s 27-21 victory over the Patriots.)

 

The effect on the NFL was instant, and predictable.  It was as if Princeton had actually beaten Georgetown.  Every coach and every owner suddenly realized that the ONLY way to win a Superbowl was to hold on to the football, execute penalty-free and turnover-free 19-play drives, and beat all those other silly coaches and owners who wanted to score sixty points every game.  The fad faded in a few years as it became clear that Parcells had parleyed a unique collection of players and a lot of luck into a championship, and that what he had done was never going to happen very often, but there are still football guys (the ones who don’t really think things through on their own), who can be seduced by time-of-possession theories and do stupid things.  Nick Sirianni is one of those guys.

 

Sirianni was nine years old when Superbowl XXV was played.  It may have been the first Superbowl he ever saw and maybe it had an oversized effect on the development of his youthful football brain.  Though I lack any evidence regarding why he thinks the way he does, that’s my theory.  And since I did have that one psychology course in college, I am fully competent to render such a judgment.

 

Copyright 2024MichaelKubacki