PHILADELPHIA - After the Eagles’ 25-14 home loss to the Panthers dropped them to 2-4 and extended a four-game skid, the largest of the Nick Sirianni era, the head coach did what leaders often do when the offense is derailing: he spread the blame in the “ultimate team game.”
The messaging did change slightly for those paying attention, however.
“Everything’s on the table,” Sirianni said, almost ominously.
That phrasing could be foreshadowing.
The Eagles have been near the bottom of the league in points and total yards under first-year offensive coordinator and play-caller Sean Mannion. Second halves have been especially difficult. Third-down failures and stalled drives have been a recurring theme even before Jalen Hurts went down with a blood clot and Tanner McKee took over Sunday as the starter.
Injuries across the offensive line, the running back room, and the skill positions have been crippling—Lane Johnson’s retirement, the Cam Jurgens trade, and other decisions have forced a rebuild on the fly.
But four straight setbacks and an offense that has frequently looked scheme-constrained rather than scheme-empowered have turned the spotlight on the man Sirianni hired to install a more under-center, play-action, outside-zone system drawn from the Shanahan-McVay tree.
Sirianni’s postgame answers were a study in collective accountability when asked by Eagles On SI if morphing the offense around McKee has to be ramped up in future weeks.
How to help?
Asked about helping the offense get going, he said they would “have to do different things,” that they would never make excuses, and that “everything’s on the table” because “to do the same thing over and over again and not get the results, that’d be foolish.”
When pressed on how much responsibility falls on Mannion specifically and his scheme, Sirianni replied that “we’ve got to be able to score more points, period,” and that “it’s not just on one coach. It’s not just one coach on an island… It’s the ultimate team game."
“We all have to do better.”
On McKee, who completed 26 of 45 for 215 yards and a touchdown to DeVonta Smith, Sirianni noted that the backup “battled,” took care of the football, and made some good throws (including a nice third-down connection to Dontayvion Wicks). The larger point, though, was the same: points were scarce, and “all of us have a lot of improving to do.”
This is not the first time Sirianni has refused to isolate Mannion.
Earlier in the season he said the coordinator would “wear a lot of this” while also stressing shared ownership. The approach is consistent with how he has framed the offense all year: identity questions remain open, growth is the priority, and public finger-pointing is limited.
It is also protective of a coach who arrived with almost no play-calling experience and whose biggest public selling points were work ethic, conviction in his system, and detail.
Conviction is now being tested in real time. Mannion has repeatedly said the staff still believes in the core structure and intends to keep leaning into it rather than overhaul it.
The early-season numbers on under-center usage and play-action success have not matched the vision that helped him land the job.
With McKee—in theory, a more traditional pocket passer—now under center for the foreseeable future while Hurts recovers, there is a narrow window in which Mannion’s preferred concepts could look more natural. The first test for those results did not provide that evidence.
In Jeffrey Lurie's organization, “everything’s on the table” is rarely just an empty message. It is usually a signal that the status quo is no longer defensible.
Whether that means more schematic adjustments, greater involvement from Sirianni in the weekly plan, personnel tweaks, better execution of what is already installed, or more drastically, a change in job descriptions, remains to be seen.
The heat on Mannion, though, is not manufactured by one press conference. It is the product of weeks of low output, visible struggles to establish an identity, and the reality that a first-year coordinator with limited experience is the face of an offense that has not yet delivered.
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