Nick Sirianni spoke to reporters on Monday after the Eagles’ Week 17 loss and was asked about the QB play from Garnder Minshew.
Nick Sirianni fell on the sword Monday afternoon.
In the wake of his team’s 20-10 loss to the Saints on Sunday, a big focus has been on the biggest mistake came late in the fourth quarter, when Gardner Minshew threw a pick-6 to Saints DB Marshon Lattimore. It basically ended the game.
While it was clearly a poor decision by Minshew, Sirianni in his day-after press conference owned the blame for the blunder.
“I’ll take responsibility for the interception,” Sirianni said. “We came back to a play that we had run earlier in the game, and they recognized it, and they made a play off of it. We gave them a recognizable formation and they made a play off of it. We put them in a tough spot right there.
“I think that's obviously a major turning point in what people envision Gardner's game being. They'll put a lot of that on that play. But I'm accepting responsibility for that. That's on me. We put him in a tough spot right there.”
On the play with just about 5 1/2 minutes remaining in the game, the Eagles were backed up but had the ball with a chance to drive the field and either tie or take a lead.
But Minshew tried to squeeze in a slant to A.J. Brown as Lattimore stared him down with inside leverage and cheated on the route the whole way. After the game, Brown explained he tried to alert Minshew to the change in coverage but Minshew never looked up at him. Lattimore recognized the formation and shouted out the route.
As a result, it was an easy pick-6.
Some questioned the effort from Brown on the play, but the Pro Bowl receiver on Monday took to Twitter (in a now-deleted series of tweets) to defend himself, saying the “route becomes dead” based on the look presented by the defense. He took offense to those who thought he loafed it.
“The responsibility on that play, again, I'll go back to my own,” Sirianni said. “We were in a three-by-one formation. We shifted the guy up to the line of scrimmage, on to the right side, putting us in a four-by-one. That's a very recognizable formation. A good corner made a play, with a smart safety on the other side, with 32 and 23 over there. They recognized it. Dennis Allen is a good coach. He recognized it. They had made an adjustment. They made a play.
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“I’ll never question our guys' effort. A.J. gives it up for his teammates all the time, every time. So, I'm never going to question [effort]. This is not a team where I'll ever question our effort because I know how hard these guys go for each other and how hard they go because they're prideful guys. Again, going back to that, that's my responsibility. That's why they got the interception.”
Even outside of that mistake, it wasn’t a good day for Minshew against the Saints as the Eagles really felt the absence of Jalen Hurts. It’s hard to imagine the Eagles losing that game with Hurts at QB and it’s even harder to imagine he would have thrown that mistake on the pick-6.
But the offense outside of Minshew wasn’t very good on Sunday either. Coaching certainly played a role in that.
And there’s a specific lesson the Eagles’ offensive coaching staff, namely Sirianni and offensive coordinator Shane Steichen, will take from the pick-6.
“As Shane and I watched it together this morning, as we watched it as a staff, we just kind of said to each other, ‘Hey, this is too recognizable of a formation to come back to,’” Sirianni explained. “‘If we do come back to that recognizable formation like that, we need to do something else potentially off of it.’ That's what we said to ourselves.
“We said, ‘Hey, this is on us.’ Just like what I said to you guys, that's where accountability starts. Accountability doesn't start by us as coaches saying to the players, ‘This is what you have to do better.’ It's part of it, but accountability is everybody looking in the mirror and saying, I screwed this up or I screwed that up. That's what's an important part of process, to say, ‘This is what I screwed up, and this is what I'm going to do to fix it with this type of detail,’ and not protect anything, just let everything be out there.”
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