Colin Cowherd didn’t just question Nick Sirianni’s game management on Monday - he questioned whether the Eagles coach even belongs in the top job category at all.
After Philadelphia’s latest late-game mess in a loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars, Cowherd unloaded on the Eagles’ handling of situational football and put Sirianni’s name under a harsher microscope than ever. The FOX Sports analyst argued that the coach’s value is tied too tightly to the people around him, not to any clear command of the entire operation.
“Second week in a row, Nick Sirianni has a blunder, end-of-game management blunder," Cowherd said on “The Herd.” “What do you do with Sirianni?
He's not a play-caller. He's completely coordinator-dependent, and now he has butchered back-to-back weeks (of) situational football.
What do you do with him?”
That criticism only got sharper when Cowherd turned to the open market question. Even with Sirianni having reached two Super Bowls with the Eagles and won one, Cowherd said he doesn’t see him as a true head coach in the NFL sense.
“There are 96 jobs in the NFL of either OC, DC or head coach. I don't think Nick Sirianni is really a head coach,” Cowherd said.
“If he was on the market, anybody hire him as a head coach? Not a chance.”
The criticism landed against the backdrop of another late-game sequence that went wrong for Philadelphia. In Week 5 against Jacksonville, the Eagles scored a field goal with eight seconds left, then still ended up allowing a long-range walk-off field goal.
Sirianni pushed back on Monday when asked about the late-game clock decisions. He framed the issue around execution and the reality of trying to squeeze out just enough yards before the final kick.
“If you don’t make the kick, nothing else really matters,” Sirianni told reporters. “So, in that situation, you’re trying to move the ball forward. Running it is an option, obviously, but with what Jacksonville was doing in that particular case, it wasn’t going to be an option.
“You saw what happened when we ran it on the third down. I never think that it’s something that you can say, ‘OK, I’m going to wait till third down to pass the ball.’ You have no idea how many times it’s going to take you to advance the ball a little bit more forward.”
The Eagles’ issues in London on Sunday have only intensified the pressure around Sirianni. With mistakes piling up in late-game situations, the scrutiny around his handling of the team has grown louder as Philadelphia works through an uneven start to the season.
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