The Eagles are 2-3 through five weeks, having lost three straight games, including a 27-7 Monday night defeat to Chicago and a 19-17 loss to Jacksonville last Sunday. As criticism of head coach Nick Sirianni grows, former Eagles quarterback Michael Vick has pushed back.
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“It’s just a couple more years, year to, it’ll start a trend back in the right direction,” Vick said. “And then they got the right coach too, man. Everybody need to get off Nick’s back, man. Sometimes I like to use my platform to say what I want to say. This is your platform. So right now I got the floor.
“I’m just saying, man, you got a good leader and a great coach and you got that tandem of head coach and quarterback. Leave it alone. I love, I ain’t gonna disrespect our Eagles fans, but I’m always telling the truth because they real. But let this combination ride out, baby. Don’t get too impatient right now. You know what I’m saying? Work yourself out.”
Philadelphia looked to be in good shape when Jake Elliott knocked through a 48-yard field goal to put the Eagles up 17 to 16 with eight seconds left. Jacksonville had no timeouts, yet the Eagles chose to let Ameer Abdullah return the kickoff instead of aiming for a touchback.
Abdullah made the most of it, handing Jacksonville a real shot at winning. Cam Little then drilled a 57-yard field goal, and Jacksonville walked away with a 19-17 victory.
Nick Sirianni put the blame on himself for that final call.
“I didn’t make the right decision, and it cost us the game,” he said. “There’s no other way around it. There’s nothing really else to say about that. It’s just I didn’t do my job good enough in that situation.”
Even without that final decision, it was a rough afternoon for the offense. Saquon Barkley left the game with a hamstring injury, and his injury is now considered week-to-week, and Philadelphia’s run game clearly missed him, since Dameon Pierce led the team with only 14 yards on 11 carries.
That left a lot on Jalen Hurts, who went 21 of 40 for 220 yards and a touchdown while Jacksonville kept sending pressure his way. He rarely looked at ease from start to finish.
The Eagles haven’t found the end zone after halftime since Hurts connected with Darius Cooper to win in Week 2 at Tennessee. This past game, Hurts did engineer the late drive that set up Elliott’s field goal, but the lead didn’t last, and the spotlight in Philadelphia is squarely on Sirianni.
“Again, bad job by me,” he said.
This was also the second straight fourth-quarter lead the Eagles let slip, after the Rams game. ESPN’s analytics gave Philadelphia better than a 98 percent chance to win in both.
Still, Sirianni has a defender in an Eagles legend.
“First of all, I’m gonna blame the offense first, right?” LeSean McCoy said on his Speakeasy show with Emmanuel Acho. “We can look at Nick Sirianni and blame this and blame that, but the truth is the offense did not play well. The defense played great!”
Sirianni owned the mistake, but with Carolina up next and Dallas on the schedule soon, the Eagles need more from the offense to ease the pressure on their head coach.