Mike Sielski: Nick Sirianni has grown up as a head coach. His handling of Jalen Carter will show how much.

Mike Sielski, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sep 7, 2025

Published in Football

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PHILADELPHIA — It wasn’t long ago that, if the Eagles had played a game like the one they played Thursday night — if their best defensive player had been ejected before kickoff for spitting at the opposing quarterback, if their best pass-rusher had been flagged for taunting, if they had committed nine penalties for 110 yards, if they had gotten into at least three fights/scuffles/brouhahas with the other team — you would have assumed Nick Sirianni had been throwing hands or hocking loogies himself.

Sirianni has gone on a wild and fascinating journey since becoming the Eagles’ head coach. The cliche emotional roller-coaster hardly does it justice. His tenure began with that infamous — and, one could argue, now largely irrelevant — introductory news conference, when he sputtered and flop-sweated through an excruciating Zoom call with media members. Over his first three seasons and the first five games of his fourth, he mugged for the nearest TV cameras, jawed with fans, and often grew so heated on the sideline that he had to rely on team security chief Dom DiSandro to calm him down.

Last season, though, once the Eagles started winning and didn’t stop, Sirianni was noticeably more controlled. And ever since the Eagles’ victory in Super Bowl LIX, he has seemed more self-assured, less manic and wild-eyed, as if the championship validated his bona fides as an NFL head coach and that validation quelled his insecurities. He doesn’t appear to be trying so hard anymore.

“There’s a certain kind of person,” the writer Jennifer Senior, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, once said. “They’re so ambitious and so driven, but the world is telling them, ‘Slow down. You’ll get there, but you’re not yet all that.’ … Once those people are acknowledged for being what they are meant to be, once they start to live out their destiny, they relax a little. They calm down.”

It’s to Sirianni’s credit that he has come this far. For too long, he was in danger of losing credibility in any attempt to discipline his players, because he struggled so much to maintain any discipline himself. One word of warning from Sirianni, and a player could just snicker and say to himself, Look in the mirror, Nick. Well, the circumstances of the Eagles’ 24-20 win over the Cowboys offer him an opportunity to prove that he still has that credibility, that he can restore a sense of order and self-control within the locker room.

“I’m going to keep all our conversations and all my disciplinary things in-house,” Sirianni said in the wee hours of Friday morning. “But we have to fix it as coaches. …

“You see how I coach with emotion, and I want them to play with emotion, and that’s what I kind of say all the time. You have to do it within the rules of the game. We need everybody out there to help us be successful.”

Those repairs don’t necessarily have to include suspending Jalen Carter for his salivary salvo to Dak Prescott. Yes, Carter has to grow up. Yes, for all his talent, for all the potential he has to develop into an all-time-great defensive tackle, Carter still has to show that he’s mature enough to maximize that talent and reach that potential. But as satisfying as it would be to everyone who was angry and frustrated with Carter’s stupidity Thursday to hammer him, Sirianni has one job here. It’s to make sure Carter doesn’t do something like this again, and that assignment demands that he understand Carter and the dynamics of the team well enough to levy not the harshest punishment but the most effective one.

Maybe the best way to reach Carter is to play on any guilt he might feel over his colossal screwup. Maybe it’s to have him run gassers after practice until he upchucks. Maybe it’s to sit him down and make it clear to him, You’re not a child anymore, but you’re putting your career in jeopardy by acting like one.

Any hothead with an iPad or a clipboard can scream at Carter or bench him or come down on him like an anvil. The old Nick Sirianni might do that. The new Nick Sirianni, the one he has been for nearly a year now, should know better what to do and how to do it to make sure Carter and the Eagles straighten themselves out. Your move, Coach.