Getty Nick Sirianni and Jalen Hurts showed off a new handshake during the Eagles' 32-6 victory in Week 1.
Jalen Hurts will become the youngest quarterback in Philadelphia Eagles’ franchise history to start a playoff game on Sunday. No pressure, right? Knowing the way Hurts prepares and perfects everything, he probably isn’t sweating too much about it.
That doesn’t mean that Nick Sirianni didn’t feel the need to give Hurts a little pep talk. The first-year head coach actually shared a motivational message with the whole team prior to their wild-card playoff matchup against Tampa Bay. What was it?
“My message is to Jalen and my message is to the team, is control what we can control right now,” Sirianni said. “That’s getting a little bit better each day and hyper-focus on the assignment and the fundamentals.”
Then, Sirianni went deep into his bag of tricks and showed a clip from the movie “Rocky” on Saturday night. He wanted to show how “demoralizing it can be for an opponent when you keep getting knocked down but you keep getting up and fighting,” per NBC Sports’ John Clark.
I’m told Nick Sirianni’s message to Eagles in team meeting last night was how relentless this team has been this year
I hear Nick showed clip from Rocky displaying how demoralizing it can be for an opponent when you keep getting knocked down but you keep getting up and fighting
It’s nothing new. Sirianni has preached fundamentals and getting one-percent better every day ever since walking into the NovaCare Complex. He also pow-wowed with All-Pro center Jason Kelce to reinforce that message while showing the Eagles a video of Kobe Bryant addressing the team from 2017. Those are two pretty great leaders to draw inspiration from.
“What’s great about that is that’s been our hyper-focus the entire year, so we’re not really doing anything differently,” Sirianni said. “We’re just bringing up that point of emphasis again that two great leaders, two great people — one that played in Philadelphia [Kelce], one that grew up in the city of Philadelphia [Bryant], emphasize going into this playoff game.”
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Hurts Trusted the Process, Stayed the Course
Hurts sounded like a broken record every time any reporter asked him how the season was going. He kept preaching to trust the process and that if the team just focused on fundamentals they would be fine. One of his favorite sayings has been that “we’re close.”
🔥Eagles QB Jalen Hurts
“we’re clearly not there as a football team… but we are this close… we have great players too, we have to put it together, we are not a finished product”
#JalenHurts says the #Eagles are going to “fight”
“Rome wasn’t built over night, but I believe”
How close? Well, he wouldn’t put a metric on it but it kept telling everyone it was coming. The Eagles would finally put a full four quarters together. Hopefully, this is the week they finally do it — in the playoffs, against the legendary Tom Brady.
“I think as an offense we’ve kind of revolutionized and evolved in terms of who we are and our identity,” Hurts said. “I’ve said it all year. I’ve said it’s coming. I’ve said different things to kind of ignite the growth in where we are now. Early on, we were searching for who we were, how we wanted to do it, and now kind of fine-tune some things, and now we’ve gotten good at a lot of different things.”
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Buccaneers Final Injury Report
The Eagles made five minor roster moves ahead of their playoff matchup with Tampa Bay. They are holding out hope that Josh Sweat will be cleared to play, too. Meanwhile, the Buccaneers keep suffering setbacks and the latest player to be ruled out was Leonard Fournette. Their starting running back wasn’t activated on Saturday, per ESPN’s Adam Schefter, so he’s ineligible to suit up.
Fournette racked up 812 yards on 180 carries with eight touchdowns this season, including 81 yards and two scores versus Philly in Week 6. The news is even more significant considering Tampa was already down running back Ronald Jones (ankle). Brady will be handing off to a backfield-by-committee consisting of Ke’Shawn Vaughn, Le’Veon Bell, Giovani Bernard. Advantage: Eagles.