Talkin' 'Bout Practice: Nick Sirianni Vindicated by Special Season

PHILADELPHIA - Some outside the NovaCare Complex probably chuckled when Nick Sirianni went all Allen Iverson in advance of Saturday night’s divisional-round playoff against the New York Giants.

The Eagles’ coach decided to talk about practice, the very thing so many old-school observers hold against Sirianni and the organization.

“We are getting better because we practice hard,” Sirianni said. “This team practices hard.”

The disconnect comes from those who correlate the length of traditional practices to “practice.”

Once a staple in professional football, the archaic two-a-days were collectively bargained out of the game years ago so practices have been scaled back across the league.

Philadelphia is near the bottom, though, when it comes to cumulative on-field practice time. Back in the summer, training camp practices topped out at two hours and could be as short as 70 minutes with rest days strategically inserted throughout the camp.

Fast forward to the regular season and the early weeks featured maintenance days on Wednesdays for veteran players and some younger ones with troubling injury histories.

As the 17-game season wore on the major practice day shifted back 24 hours in favor of walkthrough Wednesdays.

"Long season,” Sirianni said. “Really long season. So you're trying to do what you can do to keep them healthy while still making sure they're ready physically, making sure they're ready mentally, all those different things.”

The results speak for themselves.

The Eagles tied for the best record in the NFL at 14-3 and had the best when starting quarterback Jalen Hurts was available.

"I think it helps quite a bit," said Dallas Goedert about the practice schedule. "You look at the last two years, we’ve been at the top or near the top of the healthiest teams, so I think there’s a big part to it.

"Up to this point, we’ve played so much football, banged so much, that late in the year, the techniques, things like that, if you can have high intensity, get a lot of plays in a short amount of time it can do everything for you that being out there for two and a half hours and having a slower tempo and not getting as many plays per period, things like that."

Only 25 total manpower games were missed by starters: nine by Avonte Maddox (hamstring/toe), five each by Chauncey Gardner-Johnson (lacerated kidney), and Dallas Goedert (broken glenoid bone), two by Hurts (SC joint sprain) and Lane Johnson (torn adductor muscle), and one each by Jordan Mailata (shoulder) and Josh Sweat (neck)

“Really do like the way we practice here,” said the coach. “Obviously, it's helped us. Now, we've had some dings along the way just like every team, but we feel like we're pretty healthy going into this playoffs, and that's a tribute to our training staff and our strength staff and our doctors.”

Inside the Eagles’ ecosystem, the idea is to practice smarter but when you do practice, go hard. Unlike the critics, Sirianni and his staff believe everything from meetings to walkthroughs up to the traditional on-field practices are that time to turn it on.

“I showed a clip of another team in practice the other day,” Siriani said. “I had practice film of [his former teams] the Chiefs, the Chargers, the Colts, and I showed one. It might have been the Chargers. And I remember one of the quarterbacks goes, ‘this is practice? This guy isn’t going hard.’

“They said that, and he was right. The WILL linebacker wasn't going hard on that play.”

Sirianni has instilled a culture of “going hard” in Philadelphia whether it’s the mental or physical part of the game.

“We work hard in practice, they meet hard in the meeting room, and they walkthrough hard,” the coach said. “When you do that, you are going to continue to rise. Again, you want it to show on the field at all times, but we know we're growing because of the way we work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

“And now we're 17, 18 weeks into this and we should be playing our best football by now because we're continuing to grow.”

-John McMullen contributes Eagles coverage for SI.com's Eagles Today and is the NFL Insider for JAKIB Media. You can listen to John, alongside legendary sports-talk host Jody McDonald every morning from 8-10 on ‘Birds 365,” streaming live on YouTube. John is also the host of his own show "Football 24/7 and a daily contributor to ESPN South Jersey. You can reach him at jmcmullen44@gmail.com or on Twitter @JFMcMullen