Nick Sirianni isn’t spending much time worrying about whether the Eagles get the respect he thinks they deserve.
And honestly, that might be the most Eagles thing about this whole conversation.
The team has piled up the kind of résumé most franchises would dream about: the second-highest winning percentage since 2021, playoff berths in each of the last five years and multiple Super Bowl trips over that same stretch. Sirianni has done his part, too. He owns the highest winning percentage of any NFL head coach over the last 50 years, and he’s one of only five coaches in league history to reach the playoffs in each of his first five seasons.
Still, the national conversation rarely sounds like praise. When the Eagles win, that’s what they were supposed to do.
When they lose, Sirianni gets tagged as the league’s worst coach and Jalen Hurts gets called overrated. That’s the standard in Philadelphia - and, from the outside, it can make a team with this much success look like it’s always under the microscope.
Sirianni knows that. He also knows chasing approval is a dead end.
“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.”
That tension - between what the Eagles have accomplished and how they’re discussed - has followed Sirianni and Hurts for a while. Sirianni has the kind of record that belongs in the Hall of Fame conversation, with only Guy Chamberlain in the 1920s and more recently John Madden, Vince Lombardi and George Allen ahead of him in winning percentage. Hurts, meanwhile, has the 8th-most wins among all quarterbacks through 82 starts.
But the headlines usually go somewhere else. Sirianni gets framed around whether he’s on the hot seat if the Eagles don’t make a deep playoff run, or whether he’s really an offensive coach if he doesn’t call plays. Hurts gets judged on passing yards, defensive reads and whether the season is somehow make-or-break, even while he keeps stacking wins.
Sirianni said he’s learned that none of that noise is worth his time.
“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.”
He said the point is to stay locked in on what he can actually affect: the daily work, the habits and the preparation that give the Eagles their best chance to keep winning.
“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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