Can the Fans Get a Refund?
As the debacle unfolded in Tampa on Sunday, I couldn’t help but think of all the Eagles fans who ventured into the searing heat of that Florida city to watch their beloved team die a quick and gruesome death.
How dare the Eagles take so lightly the blind loyalty of their fans.
Shame on all of them, from owner Jeff Lurie to the last player on the practice squad. This city deserves a better team than they seem capable of providing right now.
Who’s going to refund the money to all those fans who gave more effort getting to Tampa than the players and coaches did on the field Sunday? Who’s going to tell the kids on their first Eagles trip that the games are not always this bad? Who’s going to say they’re sorry to the hundreds of people who rearranged their lives to witness that disaster?
Maybe it was because I had ventured into the equally hot and humid atmosphere of New Orleans the previous weekend, or maybe it was because I understand, better than the team itself, just how important every one of the 17 games are to the fans. Whatever it was, I felt a special sympathy for the Eagles loyalists in that 93-degree heat on Sunday.
There is no excuse for what happened in Tampa. None. And no excuse will make up for the thousands of dollars and buckets of sweat lost by the loyal fans in an event that was more a charade than a football game.
If I were still on the air at WIP, I would have begun the show on Monday by calling for the immediate dismissal of Nick Sirianni as the Eagles head coach. This would not have been as dramatic a pronouncement as it seems, since I’m pretty sure I would have already made that demand at the end of last season’s historic collapse.
On behalf of all of those fans who braved a 108-degree heat index, $300 to $500 ticket prices and all of the other sacrifices of traveling 920 miles to cheer on their visiting team, I demand better answers from Sirianni than he gave after the 33-16 debacle.
In the spirit of Andy Reid’s incessant “I gotta do a better job” response during his 14 lost seasons here, Sirianni rolled out his equally familiar – and insulting – “It starts with me” explanation for one of the worst performances by an Eagles team in the millennium.
How bad was it?
In the first seven possessions, the Buccaneers scored 24 points, gained 254 net yards and had 16 first downs. The Eagles had zero points, zero net years and zero first downs.
You cannot make this stuff up.
Since the Eagles have been scoreless in the first quarter of all four games this season, plus the last two in 2023, the issue of slow starts was a main theme in the post-game waste of time with Sirianni. After all, the Birds have been outscored 36-0 in the first quarter of the last six games. He has had to answer the question before. You would think he could come up with something new by now.
“I’m not hitting the panic button,” he said. (Last Nov. 27, actually).
“We couldn’t play a worst first quarter than we did.” (Sept. 6).
“We obviously didn’t start well, down 24-0 to start things off,” said Capt. Obvious. “No excuse for that. We didn’t come out — we didn’t coach well enough and we didn’t play well enough.”
With a day to consider more carefully his answers, Sirianni only made the situation worse. He actually had the audacity to suggest the adversity in Tampa will bring his players closer together, more determined than ever to reverse their recent fortunes.
The obvious follow-up was never asked: Why didn’t that happen last season, when your team was losing six out of seven? Why didn’t the players bond after San Francisco crushed the Eagles, 42-19, last December? The next week the Eagles were roadkill against the Cowboys (33-13). Why didn’t they bond then? The season ended a few weeks later with a 32-9 steamroll in Tampa..
Why is this team going to bond now when it had seven games to do it last season, and the nightmare just kept getting worse?
There is no polite way to say this, so let’s just deal with the harsh reality of this team and this head coach. There is no chance – zero – that Nick Sirianni can fix whatever he has broken in his four seasons running the team. The same problems keep cropping up – bad starts, illogical strategy, horrible tackling, devastating turnovers – and all we get in response is more hollow promises that better days are ahead.
The question everyone is asking – at least to me, in a deluge of emails this week – is what Lurie and GM Howie Roseman are thinking after this latest embarrassment. I think I know exactly what they’re thinking:
- This is not our fault. The roster is excellent, and the ownership support is the best in the NFL.
- Maybe we should have ended Sirianni’s misery at the end of last season? No, that can’t be true. We are never wrong.
- Should we have given quarterback Jalen Hurts a $255-million contract? (Since then, he has turned the ball over 27 times in 20 games.) No, we definitely did the right thing. We always do.
- If we have to replace Sirianni at the end of the season, what other yes men will be available? Can we find another young, eager coach who will let us coach the team from the luxury box?
The single dumbest thing written and broadcast in the past year has
been the rampant speculation that next in line to fix this mess is Bill Belichick, who is currently wasting his time, and ours, with insipid NFL commentary on a variety of platforms.
Oh, please. After 30 years of hiring one young coach after another to do his bidding, suddenly Lurie is going to hand the keys of his franchise to an aging grump known for doing and saying whatever he wants?
Not a chance. Nor is there any chance Sirianni will rescue the Eagles from their inevitable fall this season. Oh, they may make it interesting for a few more weeks after the bye when they face a bunch of lousy losing teams, but this team is going nowhere this season.
And, if they’re smart, the fans are doing likewise. Please, no more “traveling well” for the loyalists who shell out their last dollar in support of their beloved Eagles. I hope these good people realize there are better ways to spend their money than on this lost, sad football team.