If you were offended by the Eagles’ coaches playing rock-paper-scissors with this year’s draft prospects, you may want to turn away from this story, because that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Philly’s 39-year-old coach, Nick Sirianni, is finding out all he can about players. That goes for the ones he already has and the ones the Eagles might consider bringing into his new workplace.
One game they’ve played over the largely virtual first phase of the offseason program is called Who Am I?Sirianni will have one of his assistants call a player and say, “Tell me everything about you that you want your teammates to know.” After that, the assistant will scour the internet, from Google to Wikipedia, to fill in any remaining blanks and present the guy in a team meeting. In some cases, Sirianni has done it himself.
Another is a retrofitted version of the old show . In this case, three-time Pro Bowler Lane Johnson was the star of the debut episode, filming directly on his iPhone. And more recently, Sirianni and his staff randomly picked individual players to introduce the team to each of the position-group rooms (second-year man Shaun Bradley was a stud doing it for the linebackers, according to the head coach).
There have been some fun byproducts to come out of all this, for sure. One was pass-game coordinator Kevin Patullo's telling his staffmates that his daughter’s a pretty competitive golfer, which led to his and line coach Jeff Stoutland's playing a round. But there’s a purpose to it, too, and it connects those rock-paper-scissors showdowns to the rest of this.
Just like last year, first-year coaches, in an environment still affected by COVID-19, have to be creative in finding ways to bond their staffs and players. And it has to happen fast—as it did with the draft prospects—because the opportunities to do it have been limited.
“I do think of it this way—it's not our first rodeo on this, because we did all go through it last year,” Sirianni, recalling his experience as offensive coordinator in Indianapolis last year, says. “And I thought Frank Reich did a great job. Really, he did a great job of challenging us as coaches, how we were going to be creative to get an advantage over everybody else in the league, how we were going to win the virtual offseason. Because that was a challenge last year.”
Likewise, Sirianni has spent five weeks challenging everyone in the Eagles’ building.
Some of it, like the stuff above, has been on a personal level. Some of it has been more directly professional. But none of it is a mistake.
After talking to Sirianni about all of it Saturday, it wasn’t hard to figure out that the whole thing—from to route combinations, and from Who Am I?to pass rush technique—can be connected to who Sirianni is.
We’ll introduce you to him this morning.
