How Nick Sirianni taunting Eagles fans set the team on the path to the Super Bowl

For weeks, Nick Sirianni has been a model of respect and decorum. For weeks, the Eagles have been virtually unstoppable. This is not coincidence.

“I love his passion, his genuineness,” said Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie on Monday. “I think it’s one of his strengths … and, at times, it’s one of his weaknesses.”

It doesn’t require much strength to indulge your greater demons. It requires great strength to conquer them. Since embarrassing himself in Game 5 this season, Sirianni has done that. An Eagles executive said Friday that, after a contentious conversation, Sirianni was convinced to call a team meeting. In it, the coach apologized to his players and his assistant coaches for being a distraction.

That resonated.

“After that game, after he addressed the team, and he said he was sorry for how he acted, and he would work on things moving forward,” lineman Lane Johnson said. “I think he’s matured in that way. That’s something he’s been reeling in.”

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The Eagles have been the best team in football since Sirianni’s apology and vow, being accountable to themselves and each other.

“I think, when the team saw him take accountability, it set the example,” Johnson said. “It was kind of a chain reaction.”

With a composed, focused Sirianni after Game 5, the Eagles won 11 of their next 12 regular-season games, cruised through their three playoff contests, and have reached the big game for the second time in three seasons. They stand one win away from a second Super Bowl title in franchise history.

“I ask the players to try to get better every single day. And that’s what I try to do as well,” Sirianni said. “There’s a time to show your emotion. There’s a time to not show your emotion. I think I’ve gotten better as the year has gone on.”

Coincidentally, Sirianni, perhaps the craziest coach in Eagles history, will face Andy Reid, perhaps the most composed coach in Eagles history, in Super Bowl LIX. Sirianni used to be a sideline madman. He pursued and harangued officials. He chided assistants. He even upbraided former edge rusher Haason Reddick during a timeout at the end of a win late in the 2023 season — an episode that prompted some choice words for Sirianni from receiver DeVonta Smith right there on the sideline.

“I don’t remember exactly what was said,” Smith said Friday, “but it was a difficult conversation. Sometimes you have those on a team.”

These days, having shown greater self-control, Sirianni has more credibility when he has to have those difficult conversations with the players he leads.

Four months ago, four games into their season, the Eagles were a .500 team coming off a bye week that they spent regretting a blowout loss in Tampa to a mediocre ball club. The Eagles were in the middle of hosting a comically bad Cleveland Browns team that, just before halftime, tied the game at 10 when they returned a blocked field goal for a touchdown.

All of this came on the heels of a historic collapse at the end of the 2023 season, which they began 10-1 and looked as resilient as the 2022 team that Sirianni led to the Super Bowl in just his second season as head coach. Of course, the Eagles then lost five of their last six games in 2023, then were blown out in a wild-card game that also was in Tampa. Sirianni’s seat was getting hotter by the day when they began 2024 at 2-2 and, at halftime, it looked like the Browns might beat them, too.

The team was booed as it left the field.

» READ MORE: Some Eagles officials called Nick Sirianni’s sideline antics ‘embarrassing.’ What does Jeffrey Lurie think?

Amid the boos came chants: “Fire Nick! Fire Nick!”

These chants resumed when the game resumed. However, after a long passing play with 2 minutes to play sealed the win, Sirianni had his chance for revenge … against the very people who pay his salary.

Sirianni turned away from the field and taunted the fans who’d heckled him. He hollered at one particularly onerous group. He then put his finger to his ear, as if to say, “Let’s hear those boos now.” A few minutes later, as he exited the field, he repeated that gesture to fans gathered above the Eagles’ locker room tunnel.

When asked about his antics in his postgame press conference, Sirianni said, with an audacious smile, “Just excited. Just excited to get the win.”

He had no concept of the depth of his sin. The first commandment in Philadelphia sports is, “Thou shalt not degrade thine own fans,” as sports figures from Mike Schmidt to Joel Embiid have learned.

The next morning, according to a league source, Lurie gave Sirianni a stern command. By that afternoon’s day-after press conference, Sirianni was appropriately contrite:

“I would say this about that: What I was really doing, I was trying to bring energy. I’m sorry and disappointed on how my energy was directed at the end of the game. My energy should be all in on coaching, motivating, and celebrating with our guys. I got to have better wisdom and discernment of when to use that energy, and that wasn’t the time.”

Was he sorry? Would he exercise discernment?

After all, this wasn’t Sirianni’s worst display of disrespect. After winning a regular-season game in Kansas City in 2023, where Chiefs fans rode him hard all game, Sirianni, enraged and validated, screamed for a very visible camera: “I don’t hear [stuff] anymore, Chiefs fans! See yaaaa!”

Lurie, who is friends with Chiefs ownership and is very close with Chiefs coach and former Eagles coach Reid, was furious with Sirianni after that incident. It didn’t keep Sirianni from taunting again — taunting his own fans.

When would this “better wisdom” manifest itself?

As it turned out, it has manifested itself over the past four months.

The Eagles have lost just once since the bye, at Washington, and after quarterback Jalen Hurts was concussed in the first quarter. However, the Eagles led that game by 13 points in the fourth quarter. The Commanders came back after combustible safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson was ejected for a second taunting penalty and after Jalen Carter was penalized for his league-high third unnecessary roughness penalty — issues of game-day self-control.

In the past, Sirianni had trouble with players listening to him when it came to matters of self-control.

» READ MORE: Jeffrey Lurie offers a candid contrast between his high-flying Eagles and Jerry Jones’ collapsed Cowboys

This time Gardner-Johnson and Carter, both of whom had played two seasons under Sirianni, considered the changes their boss had made in himself. Neither has committed this sort of penalty since. In fact, the Eagles decreased their penalty rate by about 8% from Game 6 to Game 17, and by season’s end, they rose from the 18th-most penalized team to the 11th-fewest.

There are more nuanced differences, too.

Sirianni quashed a potentially explosive situation after A.J. Brown was caught on camera reading a book on the bench between offensive possessions. Brown finished the NFC wild-card game against the Green Bay Packers with one catch, and the optics of the incident were awful.

In the past, Sirianni might have been brusque; this time, as soon as the game was over, he calmly explained that reading inspirational passages is a mechanism Brown uses to stay cool and focused when he’s not in the game, and said, “I fully encourage them to do that.”

Sirianni then cautioned football analysts and social media sleuths outraged by Brown’s choice of in-game therapy to wait until they get the whole story before criticizing. Pretty smooth, for Nick. The old Nick would have been much less gracious, much more indulgent of his passion.

» READ MORE: Lane Johnson, Saquon Barkley, and Nick Sirianni would benefit most from a Super Bowl title for the Eagles

“A lot of the times, that passion spills over,” Lurie said. “He is his own biggest critic, and he’s very self-aware. He’s very aware of when, you know, he wishes he didn’t do certain things. He’s growing. He grows all the time. I’ve seen that with every coach we’ve ever had.”

There are a couple of examples in Lurie’s past.

In 1999, at Reid’s first training camp, George Hegamin went AWOL in the middle of practice after learning he’d lost his starting spot. Hegamin cooled off and returned, and Reid let him come back — but he humiliated him by making him push a blocking sled up and down the field in blazing heat wearing full pads, to the outrage of Eagles veterans. Reid never again disciplined another player in public.

In 2016, Doug Pederson’s first year as a head coach, both Zach Ertz and Rodney McLeod shied away from contact during a game in Cincinnati. The next day, Pederson admitted that the plays were unacceptable, which left players feeling betrayed. They confronted Pederson, whose public criticisms of his players became much more benign.

Certainly, neither Reid nor Pederson turned into pushovers. Sirianni hasn’t, either.

» READ MORE: Takeaways from Howie Roseman and Nick Sirianni meeting with Eagles writers before Super Bowl LIX

Sirianni still yells at referees and he still hollers at his players and coaches — on the sideline in December, massive defensive line coach Clint Hurtt blocked Sirianni from approaching defensive tackle Carter after a dumb penalty — but the incidence of these incidents has dramatically dwindled.

To be fair, if Sirianni didn’t blow up occasionally, we’d start calling him a phony.

“You have to be genuine. You have to be who you are. If I’m not being true to myself, still growing, they will know I’m a fraud,” Sirianni said. “Forty-three years of habits are hard to break.”

The Eagles will face the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX on Sunday. Join Eagles beat reporters Olivia Reiner and EJ Smith as they dissect the hottest storylines surrounding the team on Gameday Central, live from the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.