Sirianni Stack, Jalen Carter Mini Suspension, AJ Brown Update

When you lose miserably in the national spotlight of Monday Night Footballyou will be put to the test, and rightly so. The Philadelphia Eagles found themselves in this exact situation after Week 2, which is much earlier in the season than anyone would like.

The three biggest stories coming out of the Eagles’ Week 2 loss are Nick Sirianni, the defensive line and AJ Brown’s absence. Those stories aren’t going away anytime soon. There are two ways to deal with this: avoid it all and hide in your own brain, or dive in headfirst and take the pain like a champ. We dive right in.

No matter how you look at it, you’re right: Nick Sirianni blew the Eagles’ final possession in the red zone. Should he have run the ball on third down? It would have been a game-winning first down at best and a waste of time at worst. You’re right. The Eagles should have run the ball.

Should he have passed the ball? The Falcons sold it all and the pass to Saquon worked, except for the part where he dropped it. So yeah, you’re right. If he had caught the ball, the game would have been over.

No matter what side of the aisle you’re on, you’re right. Now what about fourth down? There’s no debate: Kicking a field goal was undeniably a mistake.

Shane Haff of Bleeding Green Nation wrote: “This brings us to the latest bad game management decision: kicking a FG to turn a 1-point game into a 1-point game. It’s 4th-and-3 from the ATL 10-yard line with 1:39 on the clock. The Eagles make the decision to kick a FG, which not only eliminates the possibility of winning the game on 1 play, but it also gives up 20 yards of field position (via the ensuing kickoff/touchback) with no time running in a time-critical situation, and the Falcons have no timeouts.”

If Sirianni had chosen not to be a coward and go for it on fourth down, three things could have happened: The Eagles could have scored a touchdown to cut the score to two, scored a first down to seal the game, or failed and forced the Falcons to make a decision. A field goal gave the Eagles a six-point lead. That meant the Falcons were in a life-or-death situation.

The last thing you want to do is give the Falcons a specific goal. This is purely a mind game: if you take a six-point lead, the Falcons know they have to get to the end zone. They have no choice but to score a touchdown and win. If the Eagles hold a three-point lead, the Falcons will find themselves in a situation where they just have to kick a field goal to stay alive, they will play conservatively and not attempt any deadly downfield shots, because that’s what offenses do. Hell, you might even get them to mess up a play where they move the ball to either hash to make life easier for their kicker.

Sirianni’s only role is to make decisions and he made a decision that ultimately resulted in the loss of the game. Losing games in crucial moments is nothing new for Sirianni’s Eagles.

Reuben Frank of NBC Sports Philadelphia wrote: “The players have changed. A lot of them. Twenty-two players who started a game last year are gone. The coaches have changed. Both coordinators and a half-dozen position coaches are new this year. The one thing that hasn’t changed, the biggest common denominator, is Sirianni, and when we start assigning blame for another nightmare Eagles loss, that’s where we have to start.”

He’s 100% right. The story of this Eagles season is that we’re going to learn a lot about everyone. When there are so many changing variables, it can be hard to learn. It’s hard to discern what things are caused by what.

What we’ve seen is that the offense is efficient and Jalen Hurts is good. We’ve seen some issues with the defensive line and some lapses in coverage. What we know is that Sirianni has no direct impact on those things this year, and what we know is that he’s the only player who’s made every decision every year of his tenure.

Frank continued: “The one thing that hasn’t changed, the greatest common denominator, is Sirianni, and when we start assigning blame for another absurd, nightmarish Eagles loss, that’s where we have to start. Because his job right now is to set the culture, to prepare the football team, to make the big decisions that set the tone for what we see on the field. And what we’ve seen on the field far too often lately is disastrous.

Sirianni is the one to blame for the Eagles’ collapse in 2023 and he’s the one to blame for continuing that downward spiral in 2024. He’s the one constant throughout all of this.

If you blinked, you missed it. On the Falcons’ first drive, Jalen Carter wasn’t on the field. It ended up being a five-play drive that saw the Falcons drive 20 yards before punting, but why wasn’t the Eagles’ once-touted power forward technically a starter?

Jeff McLane of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Carter didn’t start the game as punishment because he was “late for something team-related last week.” There are a few things to take away from this, and one is that it may have been an overreaction to something small and relatively insignificant.

First of all, this sounds like something you have to do when you join a fraternity. If you’re late to a meeting, a fraternity master might punish you, but it’s likely to fall on deaf ears. Your best bet is to punish your fraternity brothers while you watch.

You made a mistake and now you have to watch your friends and the people you spend the most time with suffer. It’s a little sociopathic, but it’s undeniably effective.

The problem here is that this isn’t college, this is the National Football League. Keeping the best players off the field hurts everyone and could derail a game. Fortunately (depending on how you look at it), Carter’s punishment didn’t derail the game. It was his time on the field and his constant one-on-one losses to Chris Lindstrom that helped derail the game.

We know Vic Fangio is an old school player and has had issues lately with his defensive players losing patience and confidence. This certainly fits Fangio’s M.O.

Second (and I hope this isn’t the case), this could be a question of where the Eagles’ defensive line is. Fletcher Cox was a leader in the Eagles locker room, and as soon as he retired, the pass rush went into overdrive and now players are late to meetings, practices, or whatever “team related” means. This could be a problem with the lack of established leadership.

Or maybe his lateness wasn’t his fault. Maybe Jalen was just stuck in traffic. Maybe he ate a few too many shrimp fajitas the night before and didn’t take his peppermint oil and Imodium in the morning. It could be any of those things, and it’s all blown out of proportion.

News of AJ Brown’s absence from the Week 2 game broke over the weekend, and the first real update we got was from ESPN’s Lisa Salters during the Monday Night Football Early on, she spoke about AJ’s injury and she said that AJ “doesn’t think it’s too serious, he expects to miss a few weeks.”

In the football world, “a few weeks” means “two more weeks” and that fits the Eagles’ schedule. Keep in mind the Eagles’ bye week at the start of Week 5.

AJ missed Week 2 and will likely miss Week 3. If that’s the case, it would be another case of malpractice on Sirianni’s part to allow AJ to play in Week 4. Typically, if a player is close to returning from injury and the bye week is in sight, they will keep that player out until after the bye week is over.

At first, it seemed like the early bye was going to be detrimental to the Eagles’ season, but given the way things are going and how they could easily go south over the next few weeks, this could be a good time for the team to hit the reset button and get their elite playmaker back.

Stay positive. Think about the growth Jalen Hurts will have while AJ is out. He can string together good games and get through the acclimatization period of a new offensive scheme without his best weapon. Think about how great it will be in Week 6 when he can run this offense with his eyes closed and throw 50-50 balls downfield to his best friend. It will be awesome.