By Max Harper
Nick Sirianni had what even his most skeptical critics have to admit was a very good debut season as Eagles coach in 2021.
They went from 4-11-1 to 9-8 and made the playoffs.
Midway through the 2021 season, Sirianni realized that Jalen Hurts wasn’t Joe Montana, and he switched up the ratio of passes to runs so that Miles Sanders and Boston Scott and Kenny Gainwell could run it up.
And Sirianni was super-aggressive, as documented by the Inky’s Jeff McLane:
Sirianni ended up one of the more aggressive coaches in the NFL.
He ranked sixth in the league, according to Football Outsiders’ aggressiveness index for the regular season, which was released in February.
According to Sirianni, he would have pushed the envelope on fourth down even more had the Eagles not been so successful on third down — they finished fourth in the league — last season.
“The outside world doesn’t know how aggressive we’re actually going to be because … we were a really good third-and-1-to-4 offense,” he said last month during an interview with The Inquirer.
“That’s why we were in the top five. A lot of those times we were like, ‘We’re going for it right here,’ but we just got the first down [on third down].
“I could argue that we would have been even more aggressive.”
