Through a cloud of cigar smoke thick as the Bayou air, enveloping all the space from the Philadelphia Eagles’ locker room to the training room to the exits, the once-embattled general manager burst into his head coach’s office. Howie Roseman and Nick Sirianni are bound by more than their jobs. Few have to live in the pressure cooker these two do, as the leaders of Philly’s fabled football franchise.
This would be their collective release, their clearing of the air.
“I just got back!” Sirianni said, his media obligations finally finished.
“I’ve been missing you!” said Roseman, already full throat into celebration, having danced and drank and sucked down a stogie with the players for a while already. “I’m so happy for you. I’m so f---ing happy for you, man. You’re a world champ!”
“You’re a world champ,” Sirianni responded. “Again!”
Working in Philly is different for a football coach or football executive.
Good thing, then, that these two, and so many other people around them, have built something that’s different to withstand all that comes with the challenges they each face in their jobs 365 days a year. It’s something that proved to be too fast, too strong, too smart, too prepared and too ready for the moment at hand for even this era’s reigning dynasty to stop on Super Bowl Sunday.
The Eagles beat the mighty Chiefs in the Superdome on sports’s grandest stage, and the 40–22 final doesn’t begin to tell the story of the bludgeoning this was. At the half, it was 24–0, and Philly had outgained Kansas City 179–23, had 13 first downs to the single first down that the Chiefs picked up on their first offensive snap and had picked off the incomparable Patrick Mahomes twice.
Many times, when we get to the season’s finish line, 285 games in, we try to find a single person to crown, be it the quarterback or the head coach or the general manager. But a game like this on a stage like this doesn’t happen because of one person. It happened, in this case, because of just about everyone. And what Sirianni and Roseman were celebrating in the head coach’s small, private office illustrated that perfectly.
They were celebrating each other.
“Let me tell you something—this guy?” Roseman says, pausing. “This guy’s unbelievable. Unbelievable. I told you how everyone on our team talks about it, how you can be great because of the greatness of others. And that comes from him—the messaging, the leadership. World champion, bro.”
The NFL season is now complete, and we’ve got it all covered. To that end, over in the takeaways, we’ve got …
• A look at how everything went downhill for the Chiefs on Sunday.
• A dive into offseason questions for both Philly and Kansas City.
• More on where the New York Jets and Aaron Rodgers stand.
• Some nuggets on Matthew Stafford, Russell Wilson and Myles Garrett.
… And a whole lot more. But we’re starting, of course, with the world champs.
The day before the beatdown, owner Jeffrey Lurie leaned back in his chair on the second floor of the team hotel, at the end of Poydras Street, telling the story of how he initially tried to figure out how to run a sports franchise.
Then in his 40s, Lurie had two role models—legendary San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh and the iconic Red Auerbach from the Massachusetts native’s beloved Boston Celtics. From Auerbach, he took how forward-thinking the glory-years Celtics always were, with the drafting of Larry Bird, knowing they wouldn’t have him for another year, a prime example. After meeting with Walsh, he took the value of maximizing every roster spot, and knowing when it was time to make a decision that might be, at least initially, unpopular.
“My classic learning from it was as a boy watching the Red Sox always sign the home run hitter,” Lurie said. “They were usually a poor team and it would be a very popular decision to go after a hitter, and yet the pitching was always a disaster. They’d never win big. So I think with Bill and with Red, for me, it was, What is the core that allows you to win consistently, no matter who the coach is? How are you going to allocate your resources and try to maximize the impact?
“Sometimes [the answers are] unpopular, but usually it produces a chance to win big and win consistently and sustain it.”
The belief was cemented early on. The hire of Andy Reid wasn’t going to win any press conferences, when he and then team president Joe Banner picked the Green Bay Packers’ assistant in 1999. Then, the Eagles were roundly jeered at passing on Heisman winner Ricky Williams for the quarterback who was, easily, Reid’s favorite in the ’99 draft class: Donovan McNabb.
“Ironically,” Lurie said, “he wasn’t even our top-rated running back. Edgerrin James was.”
So began a quarter-century of consistent, sustained success for the Eagles.
And the roster that Eagles-lifer Roseman built for 2024 was, in so many ways, a great illustration of all the principles that Lurie put in place all those years ago.
The equivalent of prioritizing pitching over the flashy home run hitter, for Philly, has been prioritizing the lines of scrimmage—over and over and over again. As for thinking ahead, the Eagles drafted Landon Dickerson in ’21 and Cam Jurgens in ’22, and Jordan Davis in ’22 and Jalen Carter in ’23, so when both Jason Kelce and Fletcher Cox retired after last year, Philly was more than ready for it. If the lines are the pitching staff, the Eagles were, remarkably enough, equipped to lose aces and maintain all their depth and balance.
That area, in fact, is really where the edge the Eagles carried into Sunday wound up being most pronounced. Philly bludgeoned Kansas City up front, with Lurie’s football operation having, again, emphasized the most important core pieces an NFL team can have.
With all that established, there was a point early in the year when this ending didn’t exactly look likely. The Eagles hit their Week 5 bye and the temperature had only turned up on the perception that Sirianni’s seat as head coach was hot, with the team struggling at 2–2.
That week, Sirianni challenged his coaches and players to look hard in the mirror. They did that, but it didn’t provide some magic elixir.
“Everybody wants to look at the bye week,” defensive coordinator Vic Fangio says, in a quiet moment outside the locker room. “We didn’t even practice. We didn’t meet the whole bye week. It sounds good, but … nothing to it.”
So they just kept working. Both Fangio and offensive coordinator Kellen Moore were pretty experienced, but also new in Philly, and knew it’d take time.
Moore used the bye week to watch the previous two years of Jalen Hurts’s tape, both with his offensive staff and with Hurts, himself. The quarterback was coming in on his time off, and the two talked every day of that week, after the rest of the players were cut loose for the break, to bounce ideas off each other. Fangio, in his words, “kind of figured out what the best style is for our guys, and we played to that style.”
And Sirianni trusted that the collapse of the year before, and rough start to 2022 would steel his team’s resolve.
“We ended last year tough, but without the adversity of last year, without the way we ended last year, without going through the process of the rebuild? And I won’t even say it was 2–2, I knew we were going to be able to get out of that, I knew we were a good team,” Sirianni says. “But what we went through last year made this possible. ... It shaped us to who we are.”
Everyone responded.
Hurts posted passer ratings topping 115.0 five straight weeks after the bye. Saquon Barkley would turn a strong start into a historic season. Rookie defensive backs Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean, and middle-class free-agent signing Zack Baun shored up trouble areas that plagued the defense in 2023. The lines got back to dominating.
But it didn’t happen overnight. Gradually, the Eagles were going from good to great, and eventually would go from great to borderline unstoppable.
“I think it was too perfect with Howie and Nick, the way they push everybody all the time to work together, to do it together, to always get better,” said head of football development and strategy Connor Barwin, who played for the Eagles from 2013 to ’16, and now is in his fifth year in a quasi-front office/coaching role. “It’s a testament to Howie and Nick and [how] Nick pushed this team every single week. And Nick was so focused this year on just getting better every single week and it being about us, about nothing else but us.
“And I think you saw it. The team was focused for 23 weeks.”
On Saturday night, in a ballroom at the downtown Hilton, the whole vision came to life. Sirianni called his leaders to the front to address the team. Captains A.J. Brown, Jake Elliott, Brandon Graham, Hurts, Lane Johnson, Jordan Mailata and Darius Slay addressed the team. So too did Barkley, Baun and Chauncey Gardner-Johnson.
“The job’s not done,” Barkley told the room.
And everyone else followed with a message that was consistent with what the last guy said.
“The common thing—together,” Sirianni recalls 24 hours later. “Not wanting to let each other down. Confidence. Focus. Hunger.”
“It was just a sense of calmness, calmness and confidence,” says associate head coach/pass-game coordinator Kevin Patullo, one of Sirianni’s most trusted confidants. “The confidence was through the roof. You could feel it. You could feel that the guys knew, like, Hey, this is what we’re supposed to do. It was special.”
The belief in the plan was in a good place too.
The offensive coaches emphasized the importance of communication, given the challenges that Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo would present on a down-to-down basis.
Meanwhile, Fangio’s troops were told, “it has to be a power game.” The feeling was, based on their past experience against Mahomes, including in Super Bowl LVII, the Eagles rushing around blocks, rather than through them, had created windows for the QB to scramble through. So the defensive line wanted to meet Mahomes where they thought he would be. As such, the defensive tackles would clog the B-gaps, and the edge rusher would bull rush.
The biggest key? Discipline. It was another example of how the Eagles had to work together.
“If you look at how we wreck together and cover together, whoever makes the play makes the play,” said Josh Sweat, who wound up being the beneficiary, with 2.5 sacks. “He’s gonna flush to somebody. It was just my time to make the plays. You see Nolan [Smith], you see Jordan Davis, Jalen Carter. It’s been their time. Today it was me and Milt’s [Milton Williams].”
“Your pass rush has to be solid against him,” Fangio added. “He’s so good at creating plays off the scrambles. And we only rushed four for the most part. It was going to be an important part of the game that we could get pressure on him with rushing four.”
Indeed, indicative of their domination, the Eagles didn’t blitz once on Sunday, which is incredibly remarkable considering that Mahomes was sacked six times, hurried nonstop and beaten to a pulp. And it was because, in Fangio’s words: “We didn’t have to.” Sweat, Smith and Jalyx Hunt bullied the Kansas City tackles. Carter, Davis and Williams controlled the middle. Mahomes had nowhere to go.
On the other side, Spagnuolo’s defense managed to hold Barkley to 57 yards on 25 carries, but Philly’s depth and balance shined through there, too. Hurts kept extending drives, both with his legs, and his arm, which eventually led to the Chiefs’ defense cracking, having endured those long Philly marches without many breaks (the Kansas City offense’s longest possession of the first half lasted four plays).
Through roughly a quarter and half, the Eagles had outgained the Chiefs 151–26, had held the ball for 16:24 to the Chiefs’ 4:58 and had 10 first downs to the one Mahomes picked up on Kansas City’s first play. The score was 10–0, and it looked like a classic example of the Chiefs taking early blows, and those blows proving to be a prelude to a flurry of returns shots.
Instead, the dam was about to break under the weight of Philly’s impressive operation.
The expectation of the world outside those in that ballroom Saturday was of Mahomes and Reid and the rest of the Chiefs stamping their greatness in the Superdome with an unprecedented third consecutive Super Bowl title—even when the Chiefs were down 10–0.
But those inside the room knew there was something different happening.
Two years earlier, similar to this time, Sirianni had a bunch of players come up and talk. Everyone, to be sure, did a great job. That said, each guy had his own unique message. Conversely, this time around, like Sirianni said, everyone seemed to be on the exact same page.
“They were so locked in,” Roseman says. “I felt like when we were in [the] ’22 [Super Bowl], we were like tourists in Italy. We were taking pictures, videos. This year we just wanted to f---ing win.”
So the strength of not one player or coach showed with the score at 10–0.
The strength of the whole thing did. Roseman—who oversees a vast personnel operation that goes so far beyond scouting, and views player acquisition as just the start of the process of fielding talented, balanced rosters—had a massive hand in it, with his keen team-building skill and uncanny ability to synthesize information. Sirianni, with his off-the-charts emotional IQ and big-picture thinking, did too.
And then, there are the players.
DeJean, whom the team traded up for in the second round, had a pick-six that made it 17–0. Baun, the mid-level pickup who caught the Eagles’ eyes with his limited tape as an off-ball linebacker, scored an interception later in the second quarter that set up a touchdown from Brown, the ’22 splash-trade pickup, to make it 24–0. In the third quarter, it was DeVonta Smith, the ’21 first-round pick drafted after the team struck out on J.J. Arcega-Whiteside and Jalen Reagor in consecutive drafts, scoring from 46 yards out to make it 34–0.
The punches were coming in bunches. And because everyone had a hand in it, as Sweat said in reference to the pass rush, it was almost like no one cared who got the glory.
Perhaps Barkley, the team’s best player all year, was the perfect example of it. With Spags’s defense having corralled him in the run game, the NFL’s Offensive Player of the Year’s biggest play of the day may have actually been a block—he picked up a blitzer on Hurts’s beautiful 28-yard bomb to Jahan Dotson (another Eagle reclamation project), who beat his man on a double move, in the first quarter. The throw got Philly out of second-and-11, with the game scoreless, and to the Chiefs 1-yard line.
Hurts scored on the next snap, on Philly’s trademark push play.
“All these guys want to do is win,” Roseman says. “Tell them what to do, when to do it, and they will do it. These players are unbelievable—unbelievable players, unbelievable coaches, unbelievable support staff. We have special people.”
Sure enough, afterward, no one was happier than the 28-year-old running back/first-year Eagle—acquired because, as Philly saw it, the position had become devalued to the point where there was market inefficiency to exploit—who strode into the locker room with a cigar in mouth and bottle of Ace of Spades in hand.
Fangio first coached in the NFL in 1986, and outside of a single season at Stanford in 2010 has been in the league since. He’s established himself as one of the best defensive minds of his generation. And yet, nearly four decades in, this was his first trip to the mountaintop.
“I heard a quote [from] Dean Smith many years ago” Fangio says. “If you remember, he went to a bunch of Final Fours before he finally won one. And they asked him the next day, How does it feel you got the monkey [off your back]? He said, I'm the same coach today as I was yesterday. We just got a championship.”
In a way, those words of wisdom from the legendary North Carolina basketball coach encapsulate how these Eagles got here, to deliver the punches they did to knock out the two-time defending champs. And they absolutely can help to illustrate how Sirianni has handled the past four years, with four playoff seasons marked with pretty consistent chatter about his job security, and whether he had done enough to maximize his rosters.
Because, despite all of it, the kid from a family of coaches stuck to who he was.
“We got a great coach,” Graham said. “Thankful to have him. And man, we got his back all the way. And the way we showed it was today.”
The key? They knew who he was. And he did, too.
“I just didn’t conform to what people wanted me to be,” Sirianni says. “I was true to myself with who I am, and I’ve been leading this way, really, since I’ve been in high school, to be quite honest with you.”
The coach then adds that he hopes his 9-, 7- and 5-year-old kids see how, even when someone criticizes you, you can rise above it. “Down the road,” he says, “I’m gonna be able to use this and be able to help them through with that.”
For now, though, this night was more than enough validation that he’d done good.
Some three hours later, he walked out of another ballroom at the Hilton with another cigar, this one unlit, in his mouth, and the job done. By then, the team’s postgame party was cleared out, save for a few groups of people waiting to take pictures with the coach. The Lombardi Trophy was put away, somewhere safer than this particular area.
It was another moment Sirianni had earned.
But as Sunday’s super shellacking showed so vividly, really, it was one everyone earned.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as ‘Great Because of the Greatness of Others’: How the Eagles United to Win Super Bowl LIX.
