Nick Sirianni doesn’t sound interested in chasing applause. And for the Eagles coach, that may be the point.
The outside conversation around Philadelphia has a familiar rhythm: if the Eagles win, they were supposed to win. If they lose, Sirianni suddenly becomes the NFL’s worst coach and Jalen Hurts gets tagged as overrated. That kind of reaction comes with the territory for a team that owns the 2nd-highest winning percentage since 2021, has reached the playoffs in each of the last five years and has made multiple Super Bowl trips over that stretch.
Still, the national view rarely matches the résumé.
Around the Eagles, the standard is so high that anything short of a championship can feel like a letdown. A first-round playoff exit, in that lens, can quickly turn into talk about the coach’s job or the quarterback’s future. Sirianni understands that reality, even if he doesn’t buy into it.
“Expectations have been high here for(ever),” Sirianni said in a recent interview. “I'm really proud of that, you know?
That standard has been what's been expected. Not only from the outside, I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do it the way we (have), to play to a standard.
“I think it's about a mindset that you have in the sense of like, ‘Hey, freaking expectations are high and it's going to push us to become better because they're so high.”
“We all struggle. We all wrestled with that.
Like, man, that's maybe not fair that the expectation is that high or, ‘Hey man, we're going to become as good as we possibly can because the expectation is so high.’ People would think, ‘Oh, the expectations are hig,’ but they're high in this building.
It's not just outside.”
Sirianni has shown flashes of frustration over how he and his team are perceived, but he also knows that energy doesn’t help him do the job in front of him. He keeps coming back to the same idea: the only useful focus is the next game, the next practice, the next detail.
“I can't control what anybody thinks or feels,” he said. “And that's OK.
If I get wrapped up into the wrong things, ‘Hey, the appreciation for us should be higher,’ like, does that really matter? It doesn't really matter, you know?
And if part of my time is being, even a second of my time is being used worried about, ‘Hey, I wish they appreciated this more,’ well, then I just lost a little bit of time that I could have been dealing with something else.”
The numbers back up why Sirianni isn’t spending much time worrying about outside approval. He is the only coach to lead the Eagles to multiple Super Bowls, and one of only five coaches in NFL history to make the playoffs in each of his first five seasons. His .694 winning percentage puts him among the best in league history, and the only four coaches ahead of him - Guy Chamberlain, John Madden, Vince Lombardi and George Allen - are all in the Hall of Fame.
Hurts’ production gets treated the same way. Instead of the wins, the conversation often drifts toward yardage totals, whether he throws enough, whether he can read defenses, or whether the season is make-or-break. Yet through 82 starts, he already has the 8th-most wins of any quarterback.
That’s the odd part of being an Eagles star or an Eagles coach: success doesn’t always buy peace. It just raises the bar again.
Sirianni doesn’t sound like someone trying to change that. He sounds like someone who has accepted it, shrugged at it and moved on.
“There's always going to be noise,” Sirianni said. “It's like, (how) does it help you to focus on that? And it really doesn't.
“And I'm not saying we've been perfect at that. I'm not saying I've been perfect at that because we're human and we haven't.
And, but I think there's this growth in finding yourself through the journey that you've went (through) to get to a point where like, ‘Yeah, should we be appreciated more? I don't know.
Who gives a bleep?’
“You know what I'm saying? It's like, that's out of my control.
So what is in my control? The daily habits that we go about to put the best product that we can on the field to ultimately do the best things that we can do.
And we've done a good job, and we want to continue to do a good job in that. But it's all part of the journey of becoming who you are.”
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