For the first time since the 2023 season ended and the team returned to Philadelphia following the playoff loss to Tampa Bay, Executive Vice President/General Manager Howie Roseman and Head Coach Nick Sirianni met the media on Wednesday at the NovaCare Complex to discuss the way the '23 campaign ended, changes within the coaching staff, and what is ahead for this football team as it eyes the 2024 season.
The takeaways? There are many, but the overarching theme is that Roseman mentioned multiple times his belief in the youth, rising players on the current roster, and Sirianni acknowledged the interest in having a "fresh" approach to an offense that he said became "stale" at times this past year.
For about 35 minutes the two answered questions and shared their vision. Here are some themes from the press conference ...
1. Sirianni on moving on from Offensive Coordinator Brian Johnson and what he's looking for next
"We evaluated our season at the end of the year. Obviously are going to be in constant evaluation of this. We did what we thought was best at the time, and I can't say enough good things about Brian, though," Sirianni said. "He's a great football coach, and he's going to have another opportunity to lead an offense, and I will miss him. Some of the things that we want to do as a team is grow in a lot of different areas and grow in some of the guys that have been in here with me, that have been there with me for a while. So it's about coming up with fresh ideas and doing some things different."
2. Roseman on how close he thinks the defense is to being where he wants it to be
"When I think about the contributions I can make to help this team, I know that when I'm doing my best and I have my best seasons, this team has a chance to have its best seasons. I hold myself to a very high standard," Roseman said. "I think we have a lot of good young players on this team. I think we have the ability to go out and continue to add to that. I'm very excited about the core that we have on offense going forward, obviously. In terms of that, our goal every year is to field the best possible team. I go back to last year on the Tuesday after we lost the Super Bowl and Nick walked into my office, and he said, 'How you doing,' and I said to him, 'I think the thing that I'm most upset about is how many good people we're going to lose on and off the field.' So, I knew what was coming. I knew the schedule was going to be harder. I knew that it was probably easier to get the offense to a place quicker than it was the defense. We never want to be just kind of middle of the pack in both. I feel like a lot of the things that we tried to do last offseason was kind of try to keep our priorities intact about how we like to build the team. We can talk about that and some of the decisions we make. I accept responsibility for whatever we've got to do to make sure that when the season falls short of not playing this week and beyond, I'm certainly responsible for that, as well."
3. Roseman on his philosophy of building the defense moving forward
"I feel like we've had a long history of success here building the team a certain way, and I think maybe there's some preconceived notions that we're just at the linebacker position, that we don't care who we play at linebacker. Again, our two Super Bowl teams over the last six years, the linebacker play was good from those guys. I think if anything, it's my belief in the players that we have, the young players that we have. I have a lot of belief, and I know Coach does, as well, in Nakobe Dean. I believe in the player. I believe in the person," Roseman said.
"We lost two linebackers at that spot, two good players from our Super Bowl team, and we had Nakobe waiting in the wings. We drafted him for that role. Obviously it didn't work out perfectly for him this year. That doesn't change the belief we have in the player. Then we felt like we'd have the ability to get an off-ball linebacker, WILL linebacker, who can run and hit, and honestly when you watch the tape, Zach Cunningham had a good year. He really did. He had a mentality that we like for that position."
4. Sirianni on replacing Defensive Coordinator Sean Desai with Matt Patricia late in season
"At the time I made that decision, like I've told you guys, I made that decision because I thought it was the best decision for the team," Sirianni said. "Obviously, we all fell short at the end, at those last six weeks of the season. All of us did. I'll say obviously Matt was in a tough situation trying to – because you can't completely change the defense, so he was trying to make some things happen with, quite frankly, things that weren't his defense.
"I know I put Matt in a tough spot, and I know I put Sean in a tough spot, obviously. But at the time that I did that, I did it because I thought it was the best decision for the football team. There's a lot of decisions I have to make like that, whether I go for it on fourth down in certain situations, what our philosophy is in a four-minute drive at the end of a game, and trust me, every time we do something like that and it doesn't work, I think to myself, what was the best thing, and I can only come back to that answer to you right now, is that – and forevermore, that at the time when I did it, I did it because I thought it was the best thing for the defense."
5. Sirianni on quarterback Jalen Hurts returning to MVP-level performance from 2022
"The one thing I do know about Jalen is when people or when there are things of his game that he needs to improve, he goes to work and he does – he busts his (butt) to do that. I think you saw such a – I think there were a lot of questions after that first year about some things about could he be the passer or whatever the questions were, and he came out and put together an MVP-type season the following year, and just the way he threw the ball, the way he delivered the ball, accuracy, all those different things. He just continues to grow.
"I said it last year a bunch. I don't know if we know what this guy's ceiling is because he's going to work and do everything that he needs to do to get better. For 11 weeks this year, he was on top of the MVP talk. You guys asked about that, and then he was on top of the MVP talk of where he was through 11 weeks, and we all had a bad stretch through the last portion of it. In fact, there were games, like even though we were in a bad stretch as a team, I thought Jalen was playing really good football."
6. Roseman on Nick Sirianni's performance as the head coach
"I've had the opportunity to work with him, and I've seen what he has done winning games. Winning games, put us in a position where we're competing for a world championship, putting us in a position where every year we're in the playoff race, and given us an opportunity with the team to do that. Those things are hard to find. I don't know the stat off my head, but I'm sure there's not more than a handful of teams who have made the playoffs the last three years. It takes all of us. We had a tough stretch," Roseman said.
"If you go back to when we walked off the field after the Buffalo game and we were 10-1, which I've talked about the time machine, I would take a time machine to do that, that would be a beautiful thing, but we can't. I think there would be a lot different narratives being told, and we can't lose sight of the big picture. We have a lot of good people on this football team. We've got a lot of good players. We've got a lot of good coaches. We've got a lot of good people in this building. I look around this building, I couldn't be more proud of the people. That doesn't mean we can't fight through adversity. That doesn't mean we can't overcome this and take this back to the level and beyond that we were at last year.
"It's not going to take a snap of the fingers. We've got to work hard. We've got to do whatever we can to have the right people, bring in the right people to do that, but we have a lot of those pieces in place. This cupboard isn't even close to bare."
