10 reasons for 2023 Eagles’ epic collapse originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
How?
We’ll be asking ourselves that for years.
How did a 10-1 team coming off a Super Bowl season and steamrolling its way to another No. 1 seed suddenly became the worst team in football?
How did the Eagles not just begin losing but losing in spectacular fashion, blowing three double-digit leads over the last six weeks of the regular season, losing to two of the NFL’s cellar dwellers, getting shredded by backup quarterbacks.
How was nobody in the organization – the Super Bowl coach, the all-pro veteran leaders, the inspirational quarterback – able to turn it around?
As always with difficult questions, there’s more than one answer.
We came up with 10 contributing factors and we probably could have come up with 100.
Nick had no answers: His first two years here, every time his team faced adversity, Nick Sirianni’s message got through. Whether he spoke about connecting, core values, accountability or plants growing underground, he always had the right story to tell, the right allegory to share, the right video to show. And keeping 53 guys pointed in the same direction is just as important as the right play call or the right personnel change. Maybe his players heard the same stories or the same messages so many times the message stopped getting through. But it’s clear that all the motivational techniques that worked so well in 2021 and 2022 and even the first few months of 2023 have stopped working. Whether Sirianni can regain that touch remains to be seen, but if he can’t get through to his team this week, it’s fair to wonder about his future here.
The wrong coordinators: Brian Johnson and Sean Desai were just the wrong hires and the deeper into the season the Eagles got, the more their shortcomings became apparent and the more opposing teams were able to take advantage. Shane Steichen is a play-calling genius and Jonathan Gannon – like him or not – is a shrewd…
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