Why Eagles Fans REALLY Hate Nick Sirianni

Let’s begin with a few snapshots of the Eagles offense, curated from the Week 13 loss to the Bears, to get Boo Birds in the mood to burn Nick Sirianni in effigy.

(Glances out office window)

Ah, it seems that they are already in such a mood. But let’s start with some examples anyway.

Example 1. The Eagles, trailing the Bears 10-3, get the ball at their own 28-yard line at the start of the third quarter.

On first down, A.J. Brown goes in motion to the right before the snap. Jalen Hurts attempts a short rollout toss to Saquon Barkley, who lined up as a pistol fullback, in the right flat. Not a bad set of wrinkles. But Hurts’ pass sails just past Barkley’s hands. A completion, with a linebacker running stride-for-stride, might only have netted a yard or two.

Second down. Outside zone right to Barkley. The backside blocking by Grant Calcaterra is awful. The point-of-attack blocking doesn’t remind anyone of The Hogs – or the 2022-2024 Eagles – either. Barkley, for his part, makes nothing happen and is dragged down from behind.

Third-and-9. Brown runs a shallow drag, left-to-right. Dallas Goedert runs a right-to-left crossing route well in front of the sticks. It’s not really “mesh” because no one is meshing. Jahan Dotson runs … NO ONE HAS EVER CARED WHAT JAHAN DOTSON RUNS. Barkley stays in to block. The Bears rush seven defenders, as if they know DeVonta Smith is the only Eagles receiver venturing downfield. A pressured Hurts wobbles an incompletion to Goedert. At least Brown, uncovered underneath, might have turned upfield for a first down.

Example 2. Later in the game, trailing 17-9, the Eagles start at their 21-yard line after a Bears touchdown. On first down, some presnap motion isolates Smith against a fill-in linebacker along the right sideline. That’s a matchup a quarterback dreams of, but Hurts underthrows Smith badly. It’s a pass interference no-call, but an accurate throw would have netted 20 yards or so.

Second down. Everyone at Lincoln Financial Field knows Barkley is getting the ball, this time on a split-zone concept to the right. Barkley cuts back and ducks his head for four yards.

Third-and-six. (Heavy sigh). Mesh. Brown running a shallow drag left to right. Reserve tight end Cameron Latu (Goedert is nicked up) running left to right. Barkley leaks into the right flat. Smith, hidden inside a trips-left formation, runs up the middle of the field, where he gets traded off to the deep safety, who was shaded to Brown’s side of the field. That’s the matchup Hurts should want! Instead, Hurts steps away from a pass rusher and dumps an off-balance throw behind Brown, who slips while reaching back for the reception.

The Eagles are forced to punt. But wait: there’s more! Latu gets flagged for a false start on fourth-and-3. And then Braden Mann belches the punt 40 yards out of bounds, setting the Bears up with a short field.

The Eagles have a myriad of problems, primarily on offense. A vocal majority of Eagles fans, who have forgotten February’s Super Bowl parade and chosen instead to live forever in the Black Bug Room of the team’s 2023 collapse, are either despondent or apoplectic.

Cooler heads would at least like a change to the offensive play-calling structure, but Sirianni is showing obstinate loyalty to Kevin Patullo. Hurts is drawing heat for his mistakes. Barkley’s anti-criticism deflector shields are at 10% and failing. Brown has stopped vaguebooking bible verses/Morissey lyrics on social media, perhaps because he has made his point.

Welcome to Philly, where the defending champions are in first place and everything sucks.

And welcome to Down the Stretch, a semi-regular feature on teams in the thick of the playoff race, even if their fans believe they are tumbling into last place for the rest of the decade.

The Eagles Story So Far

Nick Sirianni arrived in 2021 and quickly earned a reputation as a culture driver and crackerjack big-picture administrator.

I’m not kidding. You can look it up.

When Sirianni arrived, the Eagles were fresh off a 4-11-1 season and reeling from Doug Pederson’s laissez-faire leadership and Carson Wentz’s passive-aggressive anti-coachability. Howie Roseman suckered the Colts into trading for Wentz and overhauled the roster, but Sirianni (formerly the offensive coordinator for the Andrew Luck/Philip Rivers Colts) rebuilt the Eagles’ self-esteem while helping to craft a Jalen Hurts-friendly offense. The Eagles surprised the NFL with a 9-8 rebound in 2021, then came within a field goal of upsetting the Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII in 2022.

Coordinators Shane Steichen and Jonathan Gannon left after the 2022 season. Some Eagles fans decided that the assistants took all of the creativity and leadership with them. The Eagles climbed to a 10-1 record by Thanksgiving of 2023, but fans remained skeptical and critical of the team’s obvious flaws. That skepticism was rewarded with an epic late-season collapse, aided and abetted by Matt Patricia’s rapid rise from “senior assistant” of a disappointing defense to the coordinator and saboteur of a dreadful one.

Most of the folks now screaming Fire Sirianni! were also screaming it after the Seahawks came back to beat the Eagles on Monday night of Week 16 in 2023. In fact, many of these fans seem frozen in December of 2023, as if permanently traumatized. The Eagles have lost just seven games in the last two years, yet each loss has prompted cries of This is 2023 again! and Fire Sirianni!, on 94.1 WIP and at my local taproom.

The Eagles hired Kellen Moore and Vic Fangio as Sirianni’s coordinators in 2024. Roseman added Saquon Barkley and put together an atypically excellent draft class, headlined by defensive backs Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean. (Trading, not drafting, is Roseman’s strong suit.)

The Eagles started out the 2024 season looking shaky (Fire Sirianni!) but improved steadily, with the defense coming together under Fangio and Barkley often carrying the offense. They played their two greatest games of the year in the NFC Championship and Super Bowl, winning their second conference title in three years under Sirianni and second championship in 10 years with Roseman running personnel.

Moore left to coach the Saints. Sirianni promoted offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo from within. Sirianni skeptics were certain the move would fail. Sure enough, the Eagles offense has sputtered and misfired for most of the year. Still, the Eagles climbed to an 8-2 record – with wins over the Chiefs, Rams, Packers and Lions – before losing back-to-back games against the Cowboys and Bears. (This is 2023 again!)

The Eagles’ recent losing streak has proven that the team’s offensive problems have been getting worse instead of better, exposed some fissures in the defense and recurring problems on special teams, and provided a cathartic scornfulness to that large, noisy segment of the fanbase that is emotionally incapable of experiencing joy.

Leadership Structure

Here’s the thing about Sirianni that everyone is afraid to say out loud: Eagles fans hate him because he looks like one of us.

Walk into Chickie’s and Pete’s just north of the Linc, or into any tavern in the Great Northeast or South Jersey, and you will see dozens of Nick Siriannis: stubbly, scowling early-middle-aged white guys who appear resentful of the fact that they are forced to spend another Sunday watching an Eagles game.

Sirianni looks like the Little League coach who benched your kid because the township quarterfinals are just too important. He’s your sister’s new boyfriend, who drives an F250 despite not being a contractor or outdoorsman and spends Sunday dinner complaining about the price of gas and teachers’ salaries.

A certain stereotypical breed of Iggles fan sees themselves in Sirianni when he jaws at officials on the sideline. They hear themselves when he’s testy at press conferences. Dan Campbell comes across as Sergeant Daddy, John Harbaugh like the polite-but-firm regional corporate manager, Sean Payton as a tell-it-like-it-is 21st century variation on Bill Parcells. Sirianni comes across as the guy arguing with the bouncer outside the strip club at 1 AM after getting kicked out of his nephew’s bachelor party. He’s the guy holding up the Wawa line because he can’t decide which chewing tobacco he wants to buy. It triggers deep-seated insecurity and self-loathing. We hate the part of us we see in him.

Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio, by contrast, is the tipsy Uncle Goombah from Shunk Street who taught every Eagles fan how to twirl spaghetti with a fork, the one whose lap we sat upon during our first Mummers parades. (Unless he was marching in the parade, in which case Aunt Carmelia jumped up, spilled her Cutty and Coke and started strutting around the living room when he appeared, dressed head-to-toe in sequins and red-cheeked from borderline alcohol poisoning, on Channel 17.) Fangio can therefore do no wrong. Being an exceptional coach helps.

Offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo arrived with Sirianni and served as an assistant under Shane Steichen, Brian Johnson and Kellen Moore. As a game planner and play caller, he most resembles Johnson. Talk about flunking a multiple-choice test.

Patullo’s house (in a toney suburb) was egged after the Bears loss. There’s nothing funny or “passionate” about that. They should reopen the jail at the Linc — or unearth the old Veterans Stadium jail — and sentence the perpetrators to 30 days.

Counter-balancing all these paisans is Howie Roseman, the NFL’s best general manager. Roseman is both an architect and a demolition expert. He builds and rebuilds rosters like a precocious preschooler in a Lego factory. If Roseman had purchased Manhattan from the Lenape, it would have only cost $12, and they would have thrown in New Jersey.

Sirianni bashers will assure you that Roseman deserves 90% of the credit for the Eagles’ success in the 2020s. (Fangio gets 5%, Barkley 5%.) They will neglect to mention that most of them were Roseman bashers from 2012 until Barkley started producing weekly 55-yard touchdowns last October.

Overseeing it all is Jeffrey Lurie: former dilettante movie mogul turned Philadelphia’s most successful sports franchise owner since Connie Mack. Lurie vanishes when things are going well but engages in some benevolent meddling when all hell is about to break loose. He has made some shrewd ownership-level moves, most notably reinstating Roseman after Chip Kelly demoted him to weightroom sanitizer in the mid-2010s. Lurie may be the NFL’s best owner right now. Eagles fans grudgingly tolerate his existence.

Quarterback Situation

Believe it or not, Jalen Hurts is having a typical year, by his standards.

Hurts’ efficiency rating through 12 games is 103.9. His rating was 103.7 in 2024. Hurts’ adjusted net yards per attempt are actually up: from 6.93 in 2024 to 7.17 in 2025. His passing DVOA is 19.0% in 2025. It was just 3.2% last year. None of these figures are far off his MVP-runner-up 2022 figures.

I combed through all sorts of splits: deep passing, short passing, sideline passing, over-the-middle passing, third down passing, under-pressure passing. There is some statistical wobble, but there are no red flags or smoking guns. Every statistic indicates that Hurts is playing about as well in 2025 as he did in 2024.

On the one hand, that should be unsurprising, because the Eagles are 8-4 and in first place. On the other hand, their offense really does look like the 1931 Frankfurt Yellow Jackets at times. Hurts is under pressure more often than he was in past years (155 dropbacks under pressure through 12 games this year; 145 in the entire 2024 regular season), but that looks more like an outcome of the Eagles’ offensive stagnation than a root cause.

Hurts has never been a high-efficiency passer. He’s a lethal deep sideline bomber and a dangerous runner. He has an almost telepathic relationship with DeVonta Smith and used to always be on the correct page of whatever A.J. Brown was reading on the sideline. He comes up big in big moments and plays the face-of-the-franchise role well.

Hurts has also always held the ball a little too long, been reluctant to throw over the middle and treated his WR3s as if they had totaled his car. Hurts often resembles a bigger, pre-weirdo version of Russell Wilson.

Given his strengths and weaknesses, it’s not surprising that the Eagles offense is moving in fits and spurts now that the running game is no longer supplying 179 rushing yards per game.

What’s Going Right

The Eagles are 8-4, in first place, and have beaten some of the NFL’s best teams and traditional contenders. That bears repeating to fans who have convinced themselves they are living in a postapocalyptic hellscape. Furthermore …

• The Eagles defense is second in the NFL at stopping opponents’ top wide receivers, per DVOA. It’s the best defense in the NFL at stopping tight ends and stopping short passes.
• Trade deadline acquisition Jaelan Phillips has made a major impact, with 18 pressures in four games. Nolan Smith’s return from injury and steady improvement from Jalyx Hunt have added juice to a pass rush that was grabbing guys off the street earlier in the season.
• The Eagles defense has allowed just 7-of-23 (30.4%) fourth-down conversions. Only the Chiefs have a better rate. This is a mixed-blessing stat, because it’s probably unsustainable. The Eagles needed to force the Lions to go 0-for-5 on fourth down conversions to beat them in Week 11. They can’t expect to keep succeeding at that level.
• The Eagles are +5 in turnover differential, thanks in part to their risk-averse offense.
• The Eagles offense has scored 22 touchdowns on 29 red zone trips; their 75.9% touchdown rate is the best in the NFL. If only those 29 red zone trips were not tied with the Raiders for 28th!

Trouble Spots

We could be here all day with the Eagles offense, so let’s just hit the highlights.

• The Eagles convert just 34.5% of their first downs, 28th in the NFL.
• The Eagles offense ranks 25th in rushing DVOA.
• Saquon Barkley is averaging just 3.7 yards per carry and 61.7 yards per game. Any suggestion that Barkley is even an accomplice to the offensive decline is met with a bloodthirsty hue and cry of “Umm, actually …” from both fans (many of whom are also Penn State supporters) and the film-grinding intelligentsia (who can always find one missed block and cry “Aha!”).
• Here are some Jalen Hurts Tush Push statistics for the last three years:2023: 42 attempts, 35 first downs, 11 of them touchdowns, 3 stuffs, 1 lost fumble, 7.1% stuff rate.2024: 35 attempts, 28 first downs, 10 of them touchdowns, 7 stuffs, 0 lost fumbles, 20.0% stuff rate.2025: 24 attempts, 16 first downs, 8 of them touchdowns, 8 stuffs, 1 lost fumble, 33.3% stuff rate.The figures above include all sneaks by Hurts (not backups) in the regular season. Fake Tush Push plays (which are very rare) are not included.I also hand-counted three motion penalties on short-yardage plays for 2025, three for 2024 and four in 2023. I may have missed a flag or two.No matter how you slice the numbers, the Tush Push has gone from a money play to a relatively inefficient short-yardage play call.
• Eagles kickoff returners average just 21.1 yards per return, 31st in the NFL. The Eagles start their average possession at the 29.1-yard line, the fourth-lowest figure in the league. A poor return game has made a struggling offense look even worse.
• The run defense short-circuits now and then: 281 rushing yards allowed to the Bears in Week 13, 172 rushing yards allowed to the Giants in Week 6. When the run defense allows opponents to sustain drives and the offense strings together three-and-outs, the Eagles can get trapped in a time-of-possession feedback loop.

Future Schedule

The Eagles face the seventh-easiest future schedule in the NFL, per DVOA; only the Buccaneers have an easier future schedule among NFC playoff contenders.

That said, the Raiders in Week 15 are the only gimme. Road games against the Chargers and Bills look very tough, though: a) both are interconference games with limited tiebreaker implications; b) the crowd in Los Angeles should be 50% Eagles fans, which may or may not provide an advantage; and c) the Bills have been nearly as dysfunctional as the Eagles lately.

Jayden Daniels will be back for the series with the Commanders in Weeks 16 and 18, making those games tougher than the standings would suggest.

Real Playoff Outlook

Here’s the DVOA-fueled breakdown of the Eagles’ playoff probabilities:

Reach the Playoffs: 92.9%

Top NFC Seed: 5.9%

Reach NFC Championship: 20.2%

Reach Super Bowl: 6.5%

Win Super Bowl: 3.0%

This is what the probabilistic profile of the third-to-fifth best team in a conference generally looks like.

Beyond 2025

The Eagles are a late-stage Super Bowl contender, and it shows on their cap ledger. They have just $18.7 million in paper cap space available for 2026, with much of their money earmarked for stars like Hurts, Barkley, Brown, DeVonta, Lane Johnson and Jordan Mailata.

Of course, all of those hefty contracts mean that most of the Eagles’ top veterans are under contract for 2026. Tight end Dallas Goedert is the biggest-name free agent likely to depart. And despite their veteran-heavy offense, the Eagles field one of the NFL’s youngest rosters this year, with many of their top defensive contributors in their second or third seasons.

So the Eagles are unlikely to collapse in 2026 due to age or cap constraints, though they could very well collapse due to (waves hands).

Bottom Line

The Eagles probably won’t reach the Super Bowl this year. They’ll falter to a better-balanced (Rams) or hotter (Packers, house-money Seahawks/Bears) team in the NFC playoffs. That’s what happened in 2021, and the Eagles reached the Super Bowl in 2022. It happened again in 2023, and they won the Super Bowl in 2025.

None of that means the Eagles are destined for the Super Bowl in 2026 simply because they are disappointing now. But you would think such an established pattern would be enough to calm some of the frothing-at-the-mouth prophets of doom in the Philly fanbase the fuck down. The roster is well constructed. The franchise has demonstrated that it knows how to make necessary changes.

A question for the Fire Sirianni! crowd, if any you are still reading: who do you suggest the Eagles replace him with?

You don’t want a defensive head coach, because you want to keep Fangio. Klint Kubiak? Did you have any idea who Klint Kubiak was this time last year? Joe Brady? If Josh Allen were a quarter-step slower and 10 pounds lighter, the Bills would be below .500, and Brady would be the quarterbacks coach at a directional school.

The Steelers might fire Mike Tomlin. You want Tomlin? How about Mike McCarthy? Brian Daboll?

Find us another Ben Johnson! you might proclaim, especially after last week’s loss. There’s no Ben Johnson this year. Even if there was, Johnson is just rebuilding a broken-down organization with a second-year quarterback by reimagining the running game and taking advantage of a last-place schedule. You know who did the exact same thing five years ago? Nick Sirianni.

Yes, the 2025 Eagles can be infuriating. No, I don’t hold Sirianni blameless. I’m just a guy who has been covering the whole league for a few decades. Successful coaches don’t grow on trees. It’s possible to be critical of a coach and his team while also remaining realistic.

Three Super Bowl appearances and two championships in under ten years have overstimulated and oversatiated many Philly fans. It like we were all marginal subsistence hunter-gatherers accustomed to a lifelong diet of puketree nuts and porcupine steaks, then we were suddenly fed a pile of Double Whoppers. Our synapses are fused. Our intestines are knotted. We’re stuffed, but we’re hardwired to greedily, angrily demand more-more-more as if we were still starving.

Success has left many Eagles fans with a confused longing for the good old days of nonstop disappointment and heartbreak. Fire Sirianni! is a really a call to blow everything up and go back to when righteous grievance was the greatest feeling a lifelong Philly sports fan could experience.

In that respect, it is also a cry for help.