Inside the Mind of Nick Sirianni

Longform

On a steamy afternoon in late May, I’m sitting inside the Wells Fargo Center, listening to the Super Bowl–winning coach of the Eagles talk about God and faith and family and football.

Before we go on, I should probably give you a heads-up that this will not be the last time God comes up in this story. I mention this fact because references to a higher power cut different ways with different folks. If you’re particularly devout, you may think the mainstream media hardly ever talks about God, and I won’t give you an argument about that. On the other hand, if you’re less devout or a nonbeliever, you may now be fearful that the point of this entire exercise is to convert you. Let me assure you I’m only bringing the subject up because I’ve come to believe that if you want to understand Nick Sirianni and the way he coaches, one of the things you need to understand is his faith.

For instance: Sirianni is appearing here at the Wells Fargo Center as part of an all-day event called Life Surge, a fascinating program — touring nationwide — that’s equal parts religious revival meeting, Tony Robbins-esque motivational seminar, and, well, sales hustle designed to get attendees to shell out big money for real estate and investment classes presented by Life Surge’s organizers. I don’t know if those organizers are headed for heaven one day, but I do know they’re pretty savvy marketers. In order to get Philadelphians’ butts into the Wells Fargo seats, they’ve put Sirianni and several other faith-driven Eagles on the program. My guess is that more than 7,000 people have shown up.

Star running back Saquon Barkley kicked off the program at 9 a.m. Ridiculously smooth and appealing on the heels of his 2,000-yard season, Barkley shared that God has become a bigger part of his life during the past couple of years. Bark­ley even noted that he’d been baptized a couple of months earlier. The news was met with cheers of approval.

After Barkley left the stage, other presenters came up, one after another, talking about faith and getting your life under control. It’s not until after 5 p.m., the last segment of the day, that an Eagles-themed video is played and Nick Sirianni walks out onto the stage.

The emcee for the event, Chris Graebe, a onetime MTV personality turned minister, begins with a question about how Sirianni built a championship-winning culture with the Eagles.

“I think it’s about figuring out what’s important to you and your team,” the coach says. “With us, it’s about ‘tough, detailed, and together.’ All of the teams that I’ve been on — the most successful teams — have been tough, detailed, and together.”

Sirianni goes on to say that he and his wife, Brett, have actually adopted pretty similar “core values” for their own family (they have two young sons and a daughter). “It’s ‘tough, detailed, and love,’” he explains. “So the same things that are important for a football team are important for a family.” More applause.

Graebe then brings to the stage two Eagles players, just-retired defensive end Brandon Graham and impressive defensive back Cooper DeJean. The conversation shifts to more God-specific topics, with Graebe asking the trio if they could feel God’s presence this season.

Graham and DeJean say yes and credit Sirianni and the coaching staff. “You can go up to his office anytime and talk to him about whatever,” DeJean says. “And I think that helps our team be open with one another, share the things they’re going through.”

“I got a text message in the middle of the season,” Sirianni says, “that said, ‘I really sense that your team loves each other, and the best teams are built on biblical love.’ Man, that was like — we talk so much about connecting. When I got that text, that meant a lot to me that he could see that. At the end of the day, we had the best team. Great individuals, but we were the best team. The Bible is all about love, so if people are noticing that …”

Graebe asks how they keep God at the center of their hectic lives. “I think for me, sometimes I get … there’s criticism, right?” Sirianni says. “Like, he doesn’t act the way a head coach is supposed to act. I get that a lot. I’m a little different than other coaches. But I try to stay true to who I am.

“You don’t have to conform to the world,” he continues, “because when you conform to the world, you’re just like everybody else. When you branch out and you’re bold and you do things you know are right, that’s when you can do, as we say, special things.”

The crowd applauds loudly, and right at that moment I get a sense of how Nick Sirianni — who certainly doesn’t act the way a head coach is supposed to act — won a Super Bowl.

•

In the four and a half years that Sirianni has been the Eagles’ coach, he and Philly fans have had a, shall we say, complicated relationship. On one hand, there’s the indisputable strength of his record: four seasons, four playoff berths, two Super Bowl appearances, one Super Bowl title. It’s one reason the Eagles rewarded Sirianni with a contract extension this offseason, one that will presumably pay him significantly more than the $7 million per year he was already making. (Details of the new deal weren’t made public.)

On the other hand, there’s the fact that, less than a year ago, a quarter of the way into the 2024 season, a large number of Eagles fans wanted Sirianni fired, not only because the team had lost seven of 10 games dating back to the previous year, but because Sirianni had more than occasionally made an ass of himself with his histrionic behavior on the sidelines. On top of that was the fundamental question of what his job actually was. “Nick, if the offensive coordinator is going to be in charge of the offense, and the defensive coordinator is going to be in charge of the defense, what is your role going to be?” ESPN reporter Tim McManus asked at a press conference in January 2024, after the team announced that Sirianni, who came up through the ranks as an offensive coach, would give up that responsibility. It was the elephant-in-the-room question, and everyone waited to see how Sirianni would respond. “The head coach of the football team,” he said tersely. Had he added, “And if anyone needs me, I’ll be on the golf course,” no one would have batted an eye.

And yet, I think a case can be made that the Eagles wouldn’t have been nearly as successful over the past several seasons without Sirianni at the helm. In fact, in that spirit of boldness Sirianni embraces, let me go one step further: In today’s hyper-corporate, huge-money NFL, Sirianni — with his Ted Lasso on Red Bull manner of connecting with and motivating players — just might be the model of what a pro football head coach should be.

Sirianni comes from a family of teachers and coaches. That he’s the youngest son and littlest brother in this brood has played a big role in who he is and how he does his job. So have several moments of real adversity in his life, and his near constant quest to keep getting better, and his faith. But maybe most important is his willingness to share all the above with the team he leads.

“I’ve always felt the most important attribute a true leader has is the ability to let people really know who he is, what he’s all about,” says 88-year-old Dick Vermeil, the legendary Eagles coach who’s spent a lifetime thinking about leadership. “You don’t hide anything from people. They know you.”

Nick Sirianni, to his great credit, isn’t hiding anything.

•

Ten days after the Life Surge event, Sirianni strides into the auditorium inside the NovaCare Complex, the Eagles training facility in South Philly. It’s the final day of offseason workouts, and he’s about to do a press conference with two dozen reporters who regularly cover the team. Wearing a midnight green Eagles hoodie with short sleeves, Sirianni still moves like the top athlete he once was. He takes a seat at a table in front of the auditorium, and the questions start.

Someone asks about Barkley, who a week earlier said he could see himself retiring abruptly at some point, the way legendary running back Barry Sanders did years ago. “Yeah, I guess anybody could do that, right?” Sirianni says. A number of other questions follow. Sirianni is open and cordial as he answers, but — like a Fed chair or a CEO on an earnings call — he’s learned to be careful; saying too much can roil the markets.

The stereotype of a football coach is a guy who wears a whistle around his neck and spends his days drawing X’s and O’s on a chalkboard. But the truth is, today’s NFL head coaches are closer to management executives. When Dick Vermeil coached the Eagles in the late 1970s, he had 10 assistant coaches. Today, Sirianni oversees more than 25 assistants, plus 90 players who together this year will earn somewhere around $280 million. Then there are the other Eagles stakeholders — millions of fans whose week-to-week emotional well-being is largely in the coach’s hands.

It was during a Q and A like this one — actually, it was in January 2021, so it was on Zoom — that Eagles Nation got its first glimpse of the newly hired Sirianni. Not to be unkind, but Jesus Christ, what a disaster that was. Sirianni was clearly nervous, and nervous Nick is excitable Nick — which meant he kept talking, with way too much energy, about how much he loved ball and how he couldn’t wait to play ball and, man, it was just gonna be so great to get out there for some ball. It was as if someone had taught a year-old Lab how to say a few words in English, then put him in charge of a football team. Ever since the Eagles won their first Super Bowl in 2018, fans have treated owner Jeffrey Lurie with a respectful reverence. Even so, post–press conference, you could practically hear Philadelphians murmuring, “Uh, Jeffrey …?”

Things didn’t get much better once the games started. After the Eagles began the 2021 season losing five of their first seven games, Sirianni encouraged his team by showing them a picture of a flower, noting that, while nothing had broken through the ground yet, the roots were spreading and strengthening. When he shared the metaphor in a media session afterward, Philadelphia fans collectively smacked themselves in the forehead. A flower, Nick? Are you freakin’ kidding me?

There was a growing sense that Sirianni, while a nice, well-meaning young guy, was simply in way over his head — and that feeling wasn’t necessarily wrong. Sirianni had spent 12 seasons climbing the assistant coaching ladder in the NFL — four with the Kansas City Chiefs, five with the San Diego Chargers, three with the Indianapolis Colts — but he wasn’t a so-called “hot” coordinator, one of those assistants the cameras focus on while announcers talk glowingly about how this guy is a shoo-in to get a head coaching job soon. In fact, the very first interview Sirianni had to be a head coach was with the Eagles, who offered him the job. Most Birds fans had never heard of him.

All that said, Sirianni did possess a certain … something. Or maybe a collection of somethings. Longtime NFL player and coach Frank Reich saw it when he was San Diego’s offensive coordinator from 2014 to 2015 and Sirianni was the team’s wide receivers coach. “I could tell he was different right from the start,” says Reich, who specifically points to three things about Sirianni. One was the way he handled himself — he worked his tail off and was hyper-organized. Another was what Reich calls Sirianni’s “football IQ” — it was clear from his knowledge of the game that he’d grown up in a family of coaches. Most significant, Reich says, was the way Sirianni connected with players. “He was the receivers coach, but he was talking to everybody on the team, you know what I mean? He just had that innate ability to connect with people. It’s like a secret sauce.”

Not that there weren’t rough edges. After Reich became head coach of the Colts in 2018 and hired Sirianni as his offensive coordinator, the two frequently battled at high volume — and at one point almost physically — about game strategy. “We were walking down the hall, and I can’t remember what happened, but one of us made a snide comment, and the next thing you know we’re in each other’s faces, yelling at each other,” Reich recalls with a laugh. “I thought it was going to come to blows.” Perhaps the most telling detail about the incident is this: While the rest of the Colts coaching staff was shocked that Reich had gotten so worked up, exactly no one was surprised that Sirianni had. That was just Nick.

All of these qualities — the organizational skills, the ability to relate to players, the passion — were present to some degree during Sirianni’s first season with the Eagles, but it was actually a different trait that helped him turn things around: his ability to listen and adapt. After the team’s rough start, he and his coaches got together and completely redid the offense, tailoring it more to the running skills of still-green quarterback Jalen Hurts. Meanwhile, Sirianni quietly handed play-calling — a role most head coaches with an offensive background keep a tight grip on — over to assistant Shane Steichen.

If you’re an Eagles fan, you know what happened next: The flower bloomed, with the Eagles winning 33 of 40 games over the next two years. It was an extraordinary run during which we got to see some of the coach’s idiosyncrasies, including his penchant for taunting the opposing team’s fans at the end of games and his fondness for bringing his kids up to the podium alongside him during postgame press conferences. If another team’s head coach had done similar things, we likely would have sneered. (Actually, if a Cowboys coach had done them, we would have had a stroke.) But Sirianni was our guy, and we were winning, so … you do you, Nick.

And then, of course, the flower wilted, with the Eagles collapsing at the end of the 2023 season and starting sluggishly in 2024. For Sirianni, the low point came last October, following an ugly win against the abysmal Cleveland Browns. After the game, he once again got into it with some fans — only this time it was Eagles fans. Then he again brought his kids up to the podium during his postgame press conference — only this time, as reporters fired tough questions at their dad, the kids looked like human shields.

Somehow, though, Sirianni once again found a way through turmoil, largely because of his ability to connect with his players and his willingness to adapt. During the bye week last October, the Eagles offensive linemen went to Sirianni and argued for the coaches to focus more on giving the ball to Barkley. Sirianni listened, the offensive strategy shifted, and once again everything bloomed. The Eagles went on to win 15 of 16 games, including a blowout victory over the Chiefs in a Super Bowl rematch in February.

Of course, winning is funny. A few days after the Super Bowl, Eagles star receiver A.J. Brown said the feeling of winning a championship — something he’d focused on for so long — wasn’t exactly what he’d thought it would be. It was somehow a little empty; the fun had been in the pursuit.

When I saw Sirianni at Life Surge, he didn’t go that far. In fact, when he was asked what it was like to hold the Lombardi Trophy, he uttered exactly the right words: “You dream of doing that your entire life. You work so hard to get to that moment, so obviously it was awesome. It was awesome to see our guys holding that trophy. And your family holding the trophy.”

And yet, something in the quiet, subdued way Sirianni made that statement suggested that, while of course winning is the most important thing, it’s not necessarily the only thing, and maybe not even the best thing.

•

Jamestown, New York, the town of 28,000 where Nick Sirianni grew up and where his parents and one of his brothers still live, is six hours from Philly, in the southwestern corner of New York state. Once upon a time furniture manufacturing thrived here, but most of those jobs have long since moved elsewhere. A few generations ago, Jamestown High School graduated 600 kids a year; today it’s half that. In the last four presidential elections, Chautauqua County, where Jamestown sits, has become increasingly Republican.

Despite the challenges, there remains a tight sense of community. On this particular June day I’m in downtown Jamestown, inside the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame, talking to two retired schoolteachers and the longtime sports editor of the local paper, all of whom volunteer their time to keep this operation running. The hall of fame is, I’m happy to tell you, a pretty neat place, filled with artifacts and mementos from several hundred of the region’s biggest sports legends. They happen to include late Eagles linebacker Bill Bergey and four (yes, four) members of the Sirianni family: Nick’s father, Fran (inducted in 2018); his brothers, Mike and Jay (inducted in 2022 and 2023, respectively); and Nick himself (inducted a few weeks after this year’s Super Bowl).

Yesterday, as it turns out, was Nick’s 44th birthday, and two of the guys here — retired teacher Randy Anderson and Post-Journal regional sports editor Scott Kindberg — tell me they each texted him birthday wishes. Nick texted right back.

All four Siriannis earned their way into the hall on merit. Fran, who coached football and track at nearby Southwestern High School, was so influential at the school that the athletic complex is named after him. Mike has spent 22 years as the football coach at Washington & Jefferson College, just southwest of Pittsburgh, where he has one of the 10 highest winning percentages of any active football coach in the entire NCAA. Jay won two New York state football championships at Southwestern High School, and he’s dominated just as much as track coach, at one point winning 35 meets in a row. And then there’s Nick, bringing up the rear with his one lousy Super Bowl victory.

The key to all this Sirianni success? Well, adaptability seems to be a common factor. When Jay’s football squads won back-to-back state titles in 2008 and 2009, they were loaded with speed and offensive talent. But a couple of years later all those kids had graduated, and the new squad wasn’t nearly as athletic. Jay — stop me if you’ve heard this before — completely rejiggered the offense, leading his team back to the state finals. Scott remembers a funny look on Jay’s face as they walked off the field in the semifinal game. “I go, ‘What’s the matter?’ He says, ‘We’re going to the state championship.’ Like, I can’t believe it. So that speaks to their ability to adjust.”

“They’re all about culture,” says Randy. “That culture of winning attracts kids. The New York State Track and Field Championships were last weekend. Every runner Jay took to the event ended up on the podium, in the top eight. That doesn’t happen by luck.”

All four Siriannis were good athletes. Fran, the patriarch, starred at Clarion University in the 1960s, and after college played for a year in a professional league in Florida. After injuring his knee, he went to Jamestown one weekend to visit his future wife, Amy, and happened to see an ad for a teaching position at Southwestern High School. He applied, got the job, gave up playing football, and spent the next several decades building his reputation in the classroom (he taught junior high science) and on the athletic field.

“Fran just knows how to reach kids and always has,” says the third hall of fame volunteer here today, Tom Priester, who taught alongside Fran for years. “He’s still the unpaid pole-vaulting coach at Southwestern, and the kids just respect him.”

As they raised their three sons — Mike was born in 1972, Jay in 1975, Nick in 1981 — Fran and Amy built a life around what Nick would undoubtedly call their core values: faith, family, and football. They were active in their Catholic parish, and Fran launched the local chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. But there were challenges, too. In 1985, Fran, not even 40, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It was successfully treated but recurred six years later.

“That was scary for all of us,” Tom says. “And not just from a coaching standpoint, but as a friend — a young friend.” Of course, if it was tough for Tom, you can only imagine what it was like for the Siriannis. Mike was in college when the cancer came back. Jay was in high school. Nick was only 10.

Fran recovered again — Tom will tell you his strong faith got him through it — and life resumed. For Nick, being a coach’s kid was a thrill. In the speech he gave when he entered the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame in February, he remembered having the keys to the high school gym and being able to sneak into the weight room whenever he wanted. On the flip side were the shadows cast by his athletically accomplished older brothers, who razzed him to no end.

As I’m talking to the guys, I gingerly bring up the topic of birth order — how it affects people. They laugh, and I’m quickly reminded that I’m chatting with two retired teachers and a journalist who’s spent a career covering high school sports. Nobody has to tell them about birth order.

“Nick is a classic youngest child in the family, always having to prove himself,” Randy says. “He was always probably the most aggressive, maybe the biggest pain in the butt.”

“At times the most obnoxious,” Tom adds, “because he’s — ”

“He’s got to be Nick,” Randy explains. “And that’s not the same as Jay and Mike. I got to carve out my own place.”

“I remember him playing high school basketball,” says Scott, “and he’d hit a three-pointer and be pumping his fist. You know, he has the wristbands on his arms …”

“That’s Nick,” says Tom.

Yeah, that was Nick. When it came time for college, there wasn’t much debate about where Nick was going. Nearly a decade earlier, searching for schools with Mike, Amy Sirianni had discovered the University of Mount Union, a small college in northwestern Ohio. Mike went there and thrived, as did Jay. Now came Nick. Spirituality was the initial attraction for Amy — Mount Union was founded by Methodists — but the school’s football program, led by a coach named Larry Kehres, wasn’t a bad draw either. You know how Mike Sirianni currently has one of the top winning percentages of any active college football coach? Well, Larry Kehres has the highest winning percentage of any coach in college football history: 332 wins, 24 losses, and three ties. That includes 21 unbeaten seasons and 11 national championships. Jay Sirianni has said it was playing for Larry Kehres that really taught him how to win.

I call Kehres, who’s retired now, to talk about the Siriannis and football. He happily obliges.

“It can sound crass, but you can never forget the job is to win,” he says when I ask how he thought about his role as coach. Having talented players certainly helps you do that, but along the way Kehres figured out there were other crucial ingredients too. The kids had to develop socially — they needed to accept accountability for themselves and work hard. And they had to get some positive reinforcement, objective evidence that they were getting better: You’re improving as a ball carrier; you’re closing the gap with the guy in front of you.

And they needed a sense that someone believed in them. Kehres tells me Mike Sirianni was on the first Mount Union team to win a national championship, in 1993. “They asked me — do you think we can win?” he says. “They wanted it. They wanted me to say yes, we can.

“The word they use now for all this,” Kehres continues, “is culture. The development of a program that would sustain itself. And that’s what I was working on.”

Nick, a talented wide receiver, played well in his freshman season at Mount Union, but in his sophomore year he hurt his right leg — a painful, serious condition called compartment syndrome, which can cause a buildup of blood and the death of tissue in the leg. In its acute form, it requires immediate surgery. The worst-case scenario is amputation. “I think it was alarming and frightening, and it can put fear into a young person,” Kehres says when I ask how Nick reacted to it. “Justified fear.”

Nick had the surgery, then suffered through a staph infection that further threatened his leg, then went through a long, grueling rehab. By the next season he was back on the field, and he was a key part of Mount Union’s national championship in 2002. But the injury has stayed with him, psychologically. “It’s still to this day the most difficult thing I ever went through in my life,” he said when the topic came up at Life Surge. The adversity, though — the mental toughness it took to get through it — is what steered him into coaching, and the experience is still something he talks about today with players. As he put it: “What an opportunity that I’m able to share with our guys when they’re going through hard times. … The things that are required to be good football players are the things required to be good men.”

Now, I want to be clear about something: While some of the above has a perhaps overly precious, life-lessons-learned vibe to it, none of it tamped down the competitive cockiness that made Nick Nick. The kid could still be kind of an ass. During his senior year, he caught his second touchdown pass in the national semifinal game. With Mount Union up six touchdowns, he kept running through the end zone, where one of his brothers was standing with his arms wide open. He and Nick exchanged playful shoves, at which point an official blew his whistle and threw a flag: a 15-yard celebration penalty. Larry Kehres reamed Nick out when he got back to the bench.

Then there were Nick’s ambitions. After playing a season in the American Indoor Football League, he spent a couple of years coaching under Kehres at Mount Union, then three more as an assistant at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. But if his father and older brothers had been content to stick with high school and college coaching, Nick — I’ve got to carve out my own place — wanted something splashier: the NFL.

In the summer of 2009, he got wind that then–Kansas City Chiefs coach Todd Haley had a home in Lakewood, New York, the community next to Jamestown, and that Haley worked out at the local Y. So Nick began showing up there day after day, wearing a Mount Union football shirt and hoping to get Haley’s attention. It worked. The two started talking, and before you knew it Nick Sirianni was being offered a job as a quality control coach with the Chiefs. It was the lowest rung of the NFL ladder, but he was in.

It says something about Nick that, even as he climbed his way through the NFL, he stayed connected to the places that shaped him. In 2015, when Southwestern High School named its sports complex after Fran, Nick — coaching for the Chargers at the time — secretly took the red-eye back home to surprise his father. Scott Kindberg says he was interviewing Fran when he saw Nick quietly approach from behind. “Hey, Coach, need an 800 runner today?” Nick asked. Fran turned around and saw his son. He started crying.

When I ask Larry Kehres if he ever talks to Nick, he says sure. In fact, Nick called him just this morning to pick his brain about something.

•

The conventional wisdom about the Eagles’ recent success is that most of the credit belongs to Howie Roseman, who over the past eight years — and especially the past four — has consistently put together the best rosters in football. I won’t argue with that. Roseman has been outstanding. And yet, as Sirianni himself says, having the best players and having the best team are not necessarily the same thing.

A few minutes after Sirianni spoke to reporters inside the NovaCare Complex on the final day of offseason workouts, the Eagles are on the field for their last practice until training camp begins in late July. It’s a crisply run session, divided into a dozen or so distinct periods, each counted down on a large digital clock off to the side of the field. Early on, position groups work with each other — offensive linemen here, wide receivers there, quarterbacks doing their own thing. Sirianni mostly sticks to the center of the field, silently watching what’s going on. But about two-thirds of the way into practice, a horn blows and the full team comes together to work on what Sirianni calls “situational football” — not just running specific plays, but running them in hypothetical game situations.

“Okay, here we go,” Sirianni shouts into a megaphone. “First quarter, third and 14, at the 40.” The first-team offense and defense line up facing each other, and the ball is snapped — poorly, as it turns out. Jalen Hurts scrambles to pick it up behind the line of scrimmage, and the play is blown dead.

Sirianni calls for the second-team offense and defense. “Second and 10, nine seconds to go in the half,” he barks into the megaphone. Backup quarterback Tanner McKee takes the snap and finds an open receiver near the sideline.

“Threes up!” Sirianni says, calling for the backup backups a few moments later. “Third and eight, at the 8.” Rookie quarterback Kyle McCord is in, but he turns the ball over. Sirianni walks over, says something to him, and pats him on the butt.

The efficiency of the practice is a testament to two of the traits veteran coach Frank Reich spotted in Sirianni years ago: his ability to stay organized, and his football IQ. The Eagles practice well, and they’re intentional about what they practice. But being an effective manager, while more necessary than ever in the NFL, is still ultimately not quite sufficient. In the end a great coach needs to build a team, and you do that — to go back, in a way, to where we started — with a little bit of Tony Robbins-esque motivational mojo, not to mention a good pastor’s touch. It’s what Reich calls the ability to connect, what Larry Kehres calls culture.

Sirianni builds it, in part, by setting an example with his own personal behavior — specifically, his near obsession with trying to improve. During his session with reporters, he was asked whether, from a leadership perspective, he approached this offseason differently, given that the Eagles had won the Super Bowl. “I focus on sustained success, right?” he answered. “What are the common denominators of sustained success?” Sirianni has become fairly well-known for picking the brains of other coaches — not just Kehres at Mount Union, but also standout leaders like Jay Wright and Dawn Staley. But he finds inspiration other places too. At his press conference, he mentioned that he’d spoken during the offseason to Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson. At Life Surge, he talked about a daily devotional he bought featuring the inspirational messages of Christian author and speaker John C. Maxwell, who had spoken right before him.

What we might call radical honesty is also part of how Sirianni attempts to create an environment where players feel connected to him and to each other. That disastrous first press conference the young coach had in Philadelphia in early 2021? Well, Eagles fans weren’t the only ones who thought it went poorly. So did Sirianni, and in a meeting with players shortly afterward he acknowledged how terrible he’d been and vowed to keep working on it. Holding himself accountable — and signaling to his team that he wasn’t going to bullshit them — was a pretty good way to start building trust. And trust, Dick Vermeil tells me when I ask about culture, is crucial. “It all stems from building trust in communication,” he says. “You’re above all honest. You know, you have to earn credibility. It’s not an attribute. If you haven’t earned it, you can’t use it. And if you lose your credibility, you’re gonna lose your job.”

Of course, honesty and accountability have to run both ways. Players like Jason Kelce and Lane Johnson have said that Sirianni excels in team meetings, especially film review sessions of the previous game. If any player makes a mistake on a play, he points it out. The objective isn’t to disparage someone for the sake of disparaging him; it’s to reinforce an atmosphere of accountability. Take care of your business.

To that group dynamic Sirianni adds a more individual touch. Before the Super Bowl this year, ESPN’s Tim McManus — the same reporter who, a year earlier, had essentially asked the coach what his job was — published a detailed piece in which he at least partly answered his own question. The story was about Sirianni’s habit of writing notes to individual players, and having deep, personal conversations with them that have nothing to do with football. Pro Bowl tackle Jordan Mailata, an Australian who’d never played football before joining the Eagles, talked about a letter he got from Sirianni after he’d been elected one of the team’s captains, praising his accomplishments and the way he led in the locker room. Linebacker Nakobe Dean got a note from Sirianni saying how proud he was of Dean for coming back from two serious injuries and turning into a top-flight player. Defensive tackle Milton Williams (who became a free agent this offseason and signed a $104 million deal with the New England Patriots) recalled how Sirianni had learned about his mother’s battle with breast cancer — and shared his own family’s fight against the disease.

“He was telling me how hard it was for him with his dad,” Williams told McManus. “Always being around him, he was an energetic guy and seeing him have to go through that. It was kind of the same thing seeing my mom having to go through chemo and losing hair and being tired all the time.”

Perhaps you’re thinking to yourself: Well, this is all swell, but does it really help a team win a Super Bowl? I’d argue that it does, and that it’s more important than ever. I referenced earlier how lucrative and corporate the NFL — pro sports in general — has become. But it’s not just the leagues; it’s the way players are developed. Most kids who end up in the NFL start focusing on it by the time they’re 10. At this point the whole thing has become so commercialized that you can think of high school football standouts less as kids playing a game than as startup brands.

Take Kyle McCord, the Eagles rookie quarterback. By the time he walked in the door for ninth grade — he went to St. Joe’s Prep — he’d already been offered a college scholarship. By the time the Eagles drafted him this past April, he’d not only played for two major college programs but had been part of an NIL bidding war for his services.

Don’t get me wrong: A jillion people would be happy to trade places with Kyle McCord. But my point is that for half his life he’s basically been a commodity. Having a head coach who might also see him as a human being — a 22-year-old kid — can make a difference.

All of this is a reminder that while there are massive differences between what Nick Sirianni does in the NFL and what his dad and brother did at Southwestern High School, in some ways the jobs maybe aren’t so different after all. “Coaching is coaching,” Mount Union’s Kehres says.

And motivating players is motivating players, and building a team is building a team. As the Eagles practice wraps up, the players come to the center of the field. During the situational football drills, the coaches keep track of which side wins each play — the offense or the defense. The players are too far away from me to hear which unit prevailed today, but I do hear Nick Sirianni tell $280 million worth of professional football talent what today’s winners get: gift cards for Chickie’s & Pete’s and Wawa. The guys give a cheer.

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At age 44, entering his fifth season as the Eagles coach, Nick Sirianni is two things at once: the sum total of all the experiences he’s had, and still very much a work in progress.

Then again, aren’t we all?

In Jamestown, the hall of fame guys tell me Fran and Amy Sirianni try to make it to as many Eagles games as they can. But their lives are busy.

“They were up visiting a neighbor of mine over the weekend,” Randy Anderson says, “and they saw me working in my yard and they stopped to say hello. They were on their way to Erie. Their granddaughter’s playing travel basketball. And a typical football weekend for them: They’ve got a grandson who’s playing football at Southwestern High School, so they’ll be there on Friday night. Saturday, they’ll go down to Mike’s game at Washington & Jefferson. And Sunday they scoot over to Philly to support Nick.”

As I was researching this story, I came across a video of Nick doing a Zoom session. No, not that initial Eagles press conference. Thank goodness. It was from seven months before that, Father’s Day weekend 2020. And, well, God was involved. The pastor of Busti Church of God in Jamestown had brought together the four Siriannis — Fran, Mike, Jay, and Nick — for a Zoom conversation about faith, family, and football. It was that week’s sermon.

They talked about many of the subjects you might imagine. But as I watched, two things stood out. One was what Nick said about impacting players. It was great, he explained, when they told him he’d helped them get better on the field. But those weren’t the moments that really touched him. “What’s really awesome are the times a player said to me, ‘Man, I didn’t know how much you cared, and I appreciate how much you care for me. … You’re willing to create relationships.’

“While the touchdowns are awesome and while the touchdowns get you wins,” he continued, “the things that are really special are when a player says that to you.”

The other thing that jumped out at me was that, as Nick said that, there were actually five Siriannis on this Zoom session. Nick was holding his then-baby son, Miles, on his lap. It’s such a curious thing, isn’t it, to hold on to your children while you talk in a public setting? Is it a form of defensiveness — kids as human shields?

Maybe it’s just another way Nick Sirianni, so driven to stand apart, so driven to connect, is telling us who he is.

Published as “O Ye of Little Faith” in the September 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.