Nick Sirianni Extends Short Week, T.J. Edwards Earns NFC Player of Week Award
Here’s one way to make a short week a few hours longer: have the fellas over to your house on Sunday.
That’s what Nick Sirianni did. As soon as the Eagles deplaned from Carolina on Sunday night, the Eagles head coach had some assistants come straight to his house, the 21-18 win over the Panthers already in the rearview mirror, and blinders on looking forward to Thursday’s visit from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
“After you win, you feel good, you're talking through it,” the coach said on Wednesday morning. “We had the Chiefs/Bills game on in the background at my house. And so, it was lighter but it was just – everything was the same in the sense that, it was just going through the process that we normally go through. And it was a couple hours.”
So, while his kids slept, he and his coaches schemed, just like, well, just like those Saturdays when his father, a high school head coach, had his assistants over to the house following a Friday night game when Sirianni was growing up.
“Definitely that Sunday was cool because it reminded me of coaches coming over to my dad's house or my parents' house when I was a kid to game plan on that Saturday after a Friday night win,” Sirianni said on Wednesday morning.
“My brother, in college, does a little of that, too. On Sundays, he'll bring some of the coaches over to his house on Sundays to prep. So it was finally my opportunity to do that. And I kind of thought that was cool.”
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Sirianni is still kind of new at this stuff, so there wasn’t any pizza waiting when they arrived. Only, he said, some leftover Cheez-It snacks from his son’s lunch, that he thought offensive coordinator Shane Steichen may have nibbled on.
He admitted to having to do better.
“I'm going to put that on our schedule to make sure next time we have the pizzas ready, whatever the beverage of choice is for the guys, we have all that ready,” he said.
Sirianni added that Frank Reich had pizzas in the locker room as they prepared for the Thursday game.
“We played a home game and we stayed in the locker room and let the traffic go through and we stayed in the locker room for about three hours on that Sunday,” he said. “And Frank did have pizzas. That's where he's better than me on that one, he had pizzas and everything like that.
"We stayed in the locker room, let the traffic go, and then went. But, it was fun, we had a good time with it.”
The next short week won’t be until next year. Thursday is the Eagles’ final primetime game of the season.
NOTE: Linebacker T.J. Edwards was named the NFC’s Special Teams Player of the Week after his late-game punt block set up the game-winning touchdown against Carolina. It is the first Special Teams Player of the Week award for Edwards and the first Eagles player to earn the honor since Kenjon Barner in Week 5 of the 2017 Super Bowl season.
Edwards is also the first former University of Wisconsin player since Troy Vincent to earn the award in Week 9, 2006.
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Ed Kracz is the publisher of SI.com’s Eagle Maven and co-host of the Eagles Unfiltered Podcast. Check out the latest Eagles news at www.SI.com/NFL/Eagles or www.eaglemaven.com and please follow him on Twitter: @kracze.
