Publicly, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones hasn’t ruled out hiring free-agent coach Bill Belichick in the future. Privately, the Eagles reportedly haven’t ruled it out either.
Appearing on 98.5 The Sports Hub, Greg Bedard of Boston Sports Journal said that the Eagles could have hired Belichick if things had gone south with Nick Sirianni after the 2023 season — and if they fall apart again in 2024.
“Probably the most interesting thing that I’ve heard, and again this is just Senior Bowl rumor mill, is that the Eagles were very interested in Belichick if things didn’t work out with Nick Sirianni and they could be at the front of the line if things again go poorly for him next year,” Bedard said, via Erin Walsh of Bleacher Report.
That’s not a full-blown, official report. Bedard clearly attributes it to the “rumor mill” at the Senior Bowl. It’s precisely the kind of thing that gets said extemporaneously during a radio appearance and never gets reduced to writing with a byline.
Still, he said it. And it meshes with the chatter that ricocheted on the grapevine in the days after the Eagles completed a 1-6 collapse by losing to the Buccaneers in the playoffs, 32-9.
Bedard explained that things went sideways for Doug Pederson and the Eagles during the postseason meeting between coach and owner Jeffrey Lurie. (They had an impasse over coordinators.) That could have happened for Sirianni, too. Based on the mask of various negative emotions that Lurie donned in the fourth quarter of the playoff loss, Sirianni likely needed to say something to get Lurie to believe that Sirianni knows what went wrong and has a good idea for fixing it (other than, you know, having “confidence” that it will be fixed).
“I told you guys that before the end of the season that teams had already reached out to Bill, backchanneled on Bill, I thought the Falcons were definitely one of them,” Bedard said. “I’m now pretty convinced that the Eagles were the other one. When things were going south, they thought this might end poorly with Sirianni and I wouldn’t be surprised given the relationship that [G.M.] Howie [Roseman[ and Bill have that the Eagles were one of those teams to backchannel through Bill.”
In other words, add the Eagles to the list of teams that could be pursuing Belichick for 2025, along with the Cowboys. And, possibly, the team in New York with which Belichick won a pair of Super Bowls as defensive coordinator.
Unless, of course, someone else hires him in the current cycle. Given that three teams in the NFC East have been credibly linked to Belichick, the one currently looking for a coach might want to consider whether to join him before they find out they can’t beat him as a twice-per-year rival within the same division.
