How Eagles coach Nick Sirianni is trying to avoid a Super Bowl hangover

Ralph Vacchiano

NFC East Reporter

When Nick Sirianni gathered his team on Tuesday for the first day of what they hope will be another long grind, he told his players the story of a heavyweight title fight that happened long before most of them were born. It was the story of a champion who felt invincible but painfully learned he was not.

“He shared a big story about Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas and how unprepared Mike was and how overconfident he was,” Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce said on WIP radio. “Sometimes he’ll say the meaning behind [those stories]. Sometimes he doesn’t.

“This one really didn’t need to be said.”

The simple point of the story of that 1990 fight that was one of the greatest sports upsets of all time is one that Sirianni plans to hammer home to the defending NFC champions over and over again.

“Nothing that we did before matters,” Kelce said. “We’ve got to earn it. We got to go out there and work.”

“Whatever we’ve done in the past doesn’t matter,” added Eagles GM Howie Roseman. “It’s what we do going forward.”

It hasn’t even been six months since the Eagles lost Super Bowl LVII to the Kansas City Chiefs by the agonizingly close score of 38-35. The pain of coming so close to a championship clearly still lingers. It could even be a motivating factor for the Eagles’ drive to get back there again.

But what Sirianni knows is that the Super Bowl hangover isn’t a myth. It has proven to be a very real thing, especially for the losers. Only eight teams have ever reached a Super Bowl the year after they lost it. No NFC team has done it since the Minnesota Vikings in 1974. Only three teams have ever won the Super Bowl the year after losing it. And 17 teams that lost a Super Bowl didn’t even make the playoffs the following season, including the 2005 Eagles team that went from losing Super Bowl XXXIX to finishing 6-10.

Not surprisingly, the Eagles spent a lot of time this offseason studying why that happens and what goes wrong with teams that can’t seem to quickly get back on top. They found “many” reasons, Sirianni said. The ones that stuck out to him were injuries — particularly to quarterbacks and the offensive line — and a general offensive decline from year to year.

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But he knows that doesn’t really tell the whole story.

“You get answers of what the common denominator is,” Sirianni said. “Maybe you don’t get it always completely, this is exactly what it is, because it’s never black and white. There’s some gray to it.”

And it’s the gray matter that Sirianni is attacking head on. He can’t control players’ injuries, but he has some control over their focus. And he wants it on today, not on what happened six months ago, and definitely not on Super Bowl LVIII on Feb. 11, 2024.

“The goal right now — right this second, right now — is not to get back to the Super Bowl,” Sirianni said. “That’s not our goal right now. I know everyone is going to be like, ‘Well, that’s a crazy thing to say.’ Our goal is to get better today. You can’t win two games unless you win one. So our goal is to get better today and to prep to get ready for our first game against New England. That’s it.”

Still, Sirianni doesn’t want the Eagles to completely forget about the Super Bowl they lost either. He clearly believes the loss can be a source of inspiration. When he met with his team on the first day of the offseason program, he showed them an image of the Super Bowl, complete with all the red and white Chiefs confetti swirling in the air.

He also admitted that at some point this season he’s likely to invoke the “pain” of the Super Bowl in one of his pregame speeches, to remind his players what they’re working so hard to avoid.

“It’s OK to use this as motivation,” he said in a reporters roundtable earlier this offseason. “You should use it as motivation. But the end goal is not just to say, ‘I’m going there.’ It’s about the process.”

The truth is, that’s probably not a novel approach. Surely a similar message has been conveyed to every other team that has tried to bounce back from a Super Bowl loss. Any coach who has ever been in that situation is really just searching for magic words and a magic formula, while praying for good health and good luck.

For what it’s worth, though, Sirianni’s players do seem to be on message for now. As best as they can, they sound like they’ve put their 13-3 season, their NFC championship, and the disappointing Super Bowl behind them.

“We’re not riding on that high,” said receiver A.J. Brown. “We lost. There is no high. Everybody knows what the goal is around here. I don’t even have to speak on it. We know we’ve got to prepare for the work and put in the work.”

“It’s a new journey,” added quarterback Jalen Hurts. “Obviously, we have a ton of familiarity, but we still have to understand that we’re still trying to … set the foundation for what the identity of this team will be. That’s the main thing.

“Anything that was done in the past really doesn’t matter. It’s about what we do now.”

Ralph Vacchiano is the NFC East reporter for FOX Sports, covering the Washington Commanders, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.

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