Eagles coach Nick Sirianni on ‘sustained success’ and what’s driving him after the Super Bowl win

Two years ago, Nick Sirianni said the Eagles’ Super Bowl loss to the Kansas City Chiefs fueled his hunger to win.

How does he feel now, just months after winning his first Super Bowl?

“Hungry,” Sirianni said during a session with beat reporters near the end of the team’s offseason program in early June.

That was the initial one-word response, but Sirianni expanded, and his long answer gave some insight into the things that will be driving him this season. The Eagles brought in a former Super Bowl champion to talk to their leadership council this offseason. That player talked about wanting to win again after winning the Super Bowl for all the new people in the building. Quickly, names like Adoree’ Jackson, the veteran cornerback who joined the Eagles in free agency after stints with Tennessee and the New York Giants, and Parks Frazier, the 33-year-old passing game coordinator who joined the coaching staff this offseason, popped into Sirianni’s mind.

“I want him to feel what we felt through that journey last year,” Sirianni said.

Sirianni has long found motivation and advice from outside the walls of the NovaCare Complex. He has spoken in the past to local champions like Dawn Staley and Jay Wright. During the offseason program, the Eagles welcomed track champion Michael Johnson to their practice field. But Sirianni, a college football player and multisport athlete in high school himself, has also long found plenty of motivation from within. And so it wasn’t all that surprising that his lengthy answer on how he’s feeling and his hunger for more ended up “way off topic,” talking about playing board games like Trouble or Sorry! with his children.

“I want to win against my kids,” Sirianni said. “You can’t just turn that off. It’s the same thing. I remember one coach compared it to playing a pickup basketball [game]. You don’t play a pickup basketball game, win a pickup basketball game, and go, ‘All right, I’m satisfied.’ No, you’re like, ‘Run that s— back. Let’s play again.’ That’s in your DNA. ... It’s in your DNA to say, ‘Run it back. Let’s play again.’ And it’s just not something that turns off.

“So it’s like, ‘All right, now that you won, how are you still hungry?’ Because I’ve been doing that. That’s what we’ve been doing our entire lives is competing. My best friend from high school said it, and I’ve read it in an article, ‘Competitors don’t always win, but competitors always compete.’ And I’m like, ‘Man, that’s such a good line, because it’s so true.’ No matter how many times you lost before or how many times you won before, you’re ready to compete and you’re ready to go. But to get to that, it takes the work, right?”

That work has been ongoing, but it starts again in earnest next week, when the Eagles report to the NovaCare Complex for training camp to begin their title defense. But despite Sirianni using “run it back,” you won’t hear the word “repeat” very often.

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In a video shared on social media, Johnson, a four-time Olympic gold medalist, talked to Saquon Barkley about his mindset when he was a champion.

“I was coming to practice every day looking for my coaches to tell me, where do I [stink]?” Johnson said. “Where can I be better? I craved that criticism because I knew that’s the thing that’s going to make me better. It’s a mindset. For you ... you’re on such a trajectory now, just being obsessive about it, little improvements. That’s what’s going to make you legendary.”

Johnson’s messages to the Eagles were consistent with those of others.

“Of all the people I talked to, and it was a lot, similar themes kept coming back on sustained success,” Sirianni said.

Those words, “sustained success,” have been part of Sirianni’s messaging throughout the offseason. Sirianni isn’t using the word “repeat.” In fact, a question during the hourlong session with reporters in June that asked whether Jalen Hurts had the perfect demeanor to repeat resulted in Sirianni spending part of his answer talking about why he doesn’t want to use the R word.

» READ MORE: Nick Sirianni looks to other successful coaches for guidance. That includes hoops legend Dawn Staley.

Defensive backs coach Christian Parker gave Sirianni a book called Daily Wisdom, and in it, Sirianni found a lesson about marathon runners.

“They don’t think about the miles that they’ve already run, they don’t think about the miles that are coming up,” he said. “It resonates with me even a little bit more and you’re always trying to find fresh ways to say the same thing. You’re running the mile that you’re in, you’re not thinking about Mile 26.”

As Sirianni alluded to, none of this is very new.

“I’m not saying anything different than I’ve said the last four years, just being focused on today,” he said “Not, ‘We’re playing this team today but in three weeks, we [have] this.’ I would have never said that in the first place.”

Sirianni’s sometimes corny catchphrases and stories have been around for a while. Remember the “growth under the soil” press conference in 2021? Flowers were thrown at the coach not long after, and two years later, even after a Super Bowl appearance, many Eagles fans wanted Sirianni gone. Now? The watering and fertilizing have happened, and a flower has sprung. Time will tell, of course, if Sirianni has himself a beanstalk.