The Eagles struggled throughout Sunday’s game against the Jaguars, but it was their end-of-game management that drew the most criticism. During his post-game press conference, head coach Nick Sirianni took full accountability for the decision-making that led to the loss, and also talked about the team’s continued second-half struggles.
“It’s gonna hurt for a while. But I’m gonna put my chest out, stick my head up, and get better from it. I’m gonna own it, and move forward.”
Here’s what else the head coach had to say:
On the late-game decision making
“I didn’t make the right decision, and I lost us that game. And that’s what I said to our guys. What hurts there is that the guys fought so hard, and then I don’t make the decision that I should make at the end of the game and I cost us the game. I put that fully on me.”
He didn’t want to get too much into whether the kickoff decision was pre-established and doubled down saying that he is to blame for the bad decision, and that it’s going to stick with him for a long time.
“I’m not going to go too much into that. I don’t really want to get into exactly what that is. At the end of the day I didn’t make the right decision, and it cost us the game. There’s no other way around it. There’s nothing really else to say about that. It’s just I didn’t do my job good enough in that situation.”
The head coach also explained the plays leading up to Jake Elliott’s field goal, and how they would hope to kick with less time on the clock.
“You would like to have it with 3 seconds left. You know, in that situation they used their timeouts. We ran the ball at the end. You’d love to pick up a first down there and be able to call a timeout and grandfather timeout, call it at about five seconds. They stopped us there, and we weren’t able to do that.
In that situation, them holding onto their timeouts helped them to get that last play, but it should have never came down to that.“
Sirianni went on to explain that they didn’t want to do anything that might lose additional yards, because it was already a long field goal attempt for Jake Elliott.
He noted that he does watch a lot of film from similar situations around the league, and also used their experience against Tennessee, when making that decision.
On second-half struggles
Sirianni said that they played halftime a little bit different this game, and it wasn’t quite good enough.
“We’ve gotta figure out our second-half offense, because we’ve put together some nice first-half offense, and have a lot of opportunities to put games away, and we haven’t been able to do that.”
He went on to say that they shouldn’t have been in a position for the last play call to matter, but they were, and it’s an area they need to improve or it will keep biting them the rest of the season.
“I think you have a team that’s together. And, I think you have an extremely mentally tough, physically tough football team that fought and played their butts off. So, those are the positives. We’ll have to watch the tape, there will obviously be other things, but I just thought the guys fought like crazy and picked themselves up after last week’s tough loss.”
Other notables
- Sirianni said he wished he was in a better mood post-game, but was really appreciative of the environment and to London for hosting the team. He also thanked the Eagles fans that traveled there, pointing out how loud it got and how much they affected the game.
- He said it’s important for him to take accountability with the team, and he has, because that’s how they build trust with one another. The head coach said that being accountable is one of their core values, and it’s something he is compelled to do.