This week, Nick Sirianni is looking over his shoulder for attempted assaults by popcorn-throwing fans and avoiding eye contact from Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie. He’s the coach who can hear the foreboding tick-tock, tick-tock of a timer, the bumbling fool who lost his locker room and then lost in the first round of the NFC playoffs, the stooge soon to be stressing over his fantasy football lineup rather than a real one.
For sure, his days are numbered in Philadelphia.
Also this week, Jared Goff is what Lazarus would have been had he had a mean right arm. He’s the quarterback who resurrected his career with the Detroit Lions and, in doing so, has given new life to a long-suffering fan base that hadn’t seen a playoff win in more than three decades. That is, until Dan Campbell’s “stud” quarterback led Sunday’s triumph at Ford Field.
Certainly, Goff is the screaming, conquering, victorious face of the Lions.
Carve them in stone. Sirianni’s incompetence in Philly and Goff’s legendary status in Motown are conclusive truths. And while we’re at it, so is the fact that Bryce Young is definitely a bust, Campbell is unquestionably a genius, and surely not even the Lusitania sank more dramatically than the 2023 Dallas Cowboys.
Judging by the overreaction that sprints and spreads everywhere after the final horn, these are the absolute and final declarations. Maybe this time they’ll hold up through the lifetime of an entire NFL news cycle — all of six fleeting days.
This league, and especially those who build their lives around it, does not celebrate self-restraint. Maybe it’s the truncated season — in comparison with baseball, basketball and hockey — along with the outsize passion from its congregants that compel and amplify overwrought responses. Prudence has no home in the NFL, and that’s why, after just one round of the postseason, manic obituaries and love letters have been penned about the careers of so many players and coaches.
It’s not that Sirianni, the young and brash third-year coach, doesn’t deserve criticism for the Eagles’ late-season collapse. It’s the unstable narrative during his brief time in Philadelphia seemingly changing from week to week. If we’re keeping count, Sirianni is the walking word salad who train-wrecked his way through his introductory news conference. As well as the trash-talking idiot who can’t help himself from going after opposing fans. But just less than a year ago, as the Eagles prepared to play in the Super Bowl, he also was Philly’s finest, whose swagger had won the support of his players and the hearts of a hardscrabble fan base.
Perhaps Sirianni is a fine coach, perfectly capturing the ethos of his city. Or perhaps all of last year his headset was turned off as his very smart coordinators (Shane Steichen and Jonathan Gannon) did all the talking and made the winning calls. Without fully knowing the thoughts within the locker room and front office, who really can tell? But that absence of certainty hasn’t stopped fans and pundits from writing and rewriting, concluding and then changing the story to fit Sirianni’s most recent results.
Goff has lived with the same blinking cursor next to his career while revisionist historians have scurried to rework his narrative. There was no shortage of material used to pile on Goff’s struggles as a No. 1 pick who had lost his way in Los Angeles. In 2021, the Rams traded Goff to the Lions, where he went winless through his first 10 games — adding to the lore that he was a loser. Around that time, TMZ mined former Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor’s Instagram for content (Pryor called Goff “terrible” and claimed he and Colin Kaepernick could do better), and one Detroit columnist explained how the Lions would’ve been better off with then-rookie quarterbacks Mac Jones or Justin Fields.
In hindsight, of course, it’s hard to suppress a chuckle when reading those statements. Campbell, Goff’s coach, once seemed like a brute while talking about biting kneecaps, but he also never stopped giving tender support to Goff as his quarterback. In fact, Campbell, not too long ago viewed as the Gaston of the NFL’s coaching ranks, knows a thing or two about being written off.
Maybe Goff just needed more time to develop because not every quarterback possesses the same insta-success gene as Patrick Mahomes. And maybe Goff’s next rival in the NFC playoffs, Baker Mayfield, needed more continuity and less upheaval during his years in Cleveland — just like Young, the most recent top draft pick, may need time after enduring a brutal first season instead of being labeled a bust.
Or maybe one day a year from now, we’ll laugh again at the idea that Goff was thought to be the “stud” of Detroit. Maybe Mayfield’s simply having one solid season and he’s still a mediocre quarterback. And maybe we just need the benefit of time to sort all that out.
But time moves too quickly in the NFL, just like the sweeping narratives. Still, there has to be a better way to celebrate a winner, or evaluate someone’s failure, than making declarative statements — with outright conviction — the moment a game or a season ends. Instead of rushing toward an etched-in-stone, absolute, definitive truth, there should be grace given to anyone who dares to say the three words never uttered by fans, media and pundits during the NFL season: I don’t know.