Nick Sirianni embraces Eagles’ high expectations – NBC Sports Philadelphia

When they win, they were supposed to win. When they lose, Nick Sirianni is the worst coach in the NFL and Jalen Hurts is over-rated.

That’s the way it’s gone lately for the Eagles, whose national reputation is not what you’d expect for the team with the 2nd-highest winning percentage since 2021, one of only two teams to reach the playoffs in each of the last five years and one of only two to reach multiple Super Bowls over the last five years.

But that’s the reality.

Expectations on the Eagles are so high that anything short of a Super Bowl championship is seen as a disappointment, and a 1st-round playoff loss means maybe it’s time to talk about firing the coach and trading the quarterback.

Is it fair? Nope. But that’s the way it is around here. Even though Sirianni has the highest winning percentage of anybody who’s been an NFL head coach in the last 50 years and even though Hurts has the 8th-most wins among all quarterbacks through 82 starts, it can seem from the outside like it’s never good enough.

“Expectations have been high here for(ever),” Sirianni said in a recent interview. “I’m really proud of that, you know? That standard has been what’s been expected. Not only from the outside, I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do it the way we (have), to play to a standard. 

“I think it’s about a mindset that you have in the sense of like, ‘Hey, freaking expectations are high and it’s going to push us to become better because they’re so high.”

“We all struggle. We all wrestled with that. Like, man, that’s maybe not fair that the expectation is that high or, ‘Hey man, we’re going to become as good as we possibly can because the expectation is so high.’ People would think, ‘Oh, the expectations are hig,’ but they’re high in this building. It’s not just outside.”

At times, Sirianni has let his frustration show with the way he and his players have been perceived, but he knows that’s not a productive thing to do and is never going to change the narrative.

Sirianni keeps reminding himself that anything that takes him away from getting the team ready for the next game is a waste of time.

“I can’t control what anybody thinks or feels,” he said. “And that’s OK. If I get wrapped up into the wrong things, ‘Hey, the appreciation for us should be higher,’ like, does that really matter? It doesn’t really matter, you know? And if part of my time is being, even a second of my time is being used worried about, ‘Hey, I wish they appreciated this more,’ well, then I just lost a little bit of time that I could have been dealing with something else.”

You don’t have this kind of success without being lazer focused. Sirianni is the only coach to lead the Eagles to multiple Super Bowls and one of only five coaches in NFL history to reach the playoffs in each of his first five seasons.

The only four coaches with a higher winning percentage – Guy Chamberlain in the 1920s and more recently John Madden, Vince Lombardi and George Allen – are all in the Hall of Fame. 

Nonetheless, if you read a national story about Sirianni it most likely won’t be about his .694 winning percentage, his two Super Bowl runs or his six postseason wins in five years, it will probably be speculating on his future and how he’s on the hot seat if the Eagles don’t have a deep playoff run or how he’s an offensive coach who doesn’t call plays.

And if you read a national story about Hurts it most likely won’t be about how he’s one of the winningest quarterbacks in NFL history after five year as a starter, it will probably be about how he doesn’t throw for enough yards while he’s winning all those games, how he can’t read defenses or how this is a make-or-break season.

“There’s always going to be noise,” Sirianni said. “It’s like, (how) does it help you to focus on that? And it really doesn’t. 

“And I’m not saying we’ve been perfect at that. I’m not saying I’ve been perfect at that because we’re human and we haven’t. And, but I think there’s this growth in finding yourself through the journey that you’ve went (through) to get to a point where like, ‘Yeah, should we be appreciated more? I don’t know. Who gives a bleep?’ 
“You know what I’m saying? It’s like, that’s out of my control. So what is in my control? The daily habits that we go about to put the best product that we can on the field to ultimately do the best things that we can do. And we’ve done a good job, and we want to continue to do a good job in that. But it’s all part of the journey of becoming who you are.”