December 1, 2025
Are there any Eagles fans still feeling confident after that lifeless, bewildering 26-15 loss to the Chicago Bears at Lincoln Financial Field on Friday?
Well, congratulations. You get to explain what head coach Nick Sirianni was saying after being asked, yet again, whether he was keeping his good pal offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo as the primary play-caller.
Here, word for word, is everything the mastermind of the Eagles, Nick Sirianni, had to say about Patullo after the loss::
“I’m not changing the play-caller. . . . I have confidence in the entire group. I know it will keep coming back to Kevin, but again, if I thought it was one thing, then you make those changes. Obviously, it’s a lot of different things, but I don’t think it is Kevin. Now, we all have a part in it. Kevin has a part of it. I have a part of it. All the coaches have a part of it. All the players have a part of it. Again, you win and lose as a team. It’s never on one thing.
“I wish I could tell you this is exactly what it is, and this is hard. It’s not easy to be successful, stay successful, so we have to, again, do it collectively. We have to do it collectively as a unit. Obviously, if I knew exactly what it was and everything that it was, then we’d have fixed it. But right now, we’re still searching and we’re still looking, and [there’s] a lot of football left to play. 8-4 right now. A lot of football left to play. This weekend will be an opportunity for us to find more answers and to figure things out as coaches, players being able to rest to gear up for this last stretch of five games. Obviously, it hasn’t been good enough, coaching, playing, and we’ve got to find answers.”
If you can pick out one crouton of wisdom in that word salad, please share it with me. What I heard was a coach say that he doesn’t know what’s wrong with his team, but it’s definitely not the biggest change the Eagles made in the off-season, going from an experienced and talented offensive coordinator, Kellen Moore, to a novice whose main attribute was his friendship with Sirianni.
The head coach is either dumber than he looks on the sideline – and make no mistake, he’s one big red nose away from being a licensed circus clown – or he’s lying about an assistant whose ineptitude is starting to infect every facet of his team.
You didn’t need a doctorate degree in football to see the stark contrast between Patullo and Chicago head coach Ben Johnson, an experienced OC at Detroit for three highly successful seasons before his ascension to the Bears head job this year.
Johnson designed running schemes that opened up the cut-back moves of running backs DeAndre Swift and Kyle Monangai. The format looked similar to what Kellen Moore was doing with the Birds’ offense last season, when Saquon Barkley was the MVP of the NFL.
Patullo has done something this season that no defense could do last year; he has found a way to stop Barkley. And now the inept OC is in the process of doing the same with Jalen Hurts, a quarterback who has never looked more lost in his six years in the NFL.
The only time the offense actually worked on Friday was when the Eagles adopted a desperate no-huddle approach late in the game, with an improvising Hurts throwing the ball in the direction of a forgotten star, A.J. Brown, who made one brilliant catch after another in his 10-catch, 132-yard, two-touchdown performance.
Forgotten? What do I mean? Ask Patullo, who previously ignored Brown for wide swatches of games even though the offense was sputtering. Brown is a fantastic pass-catcher – but only when the ball is thrown his way.
Because the media covering the Eagles have become lemmings waiting for direction from the clueless head coach, the narrative after the Chicago loss is that there are many culprits for what is resembling more and more the 2023 debacle.
Sirianni blabs like a trained parrot after every defeat, “Again, you win and lose as a team. It’s never one thing.” I beg to differ. in this case, Patullo’s spectacular failure as OC is slowly leading to the decline and eventual collapse of all other parts of an extremely talented roster.
For example, the Birds’ defense was shockingly ineffective against Chicago, allowing 281 rushing yards on Friday. Swift (125) and Monangai (130) themselves accounted for 255, the first time in 40 years the Eagles have allowed two 100-yard rushers in the same game.
How is this possible with run-stoppers like Jalen Carter and Jordan Davis in the middle of the Eagles defensive line?
Well, one way to bump up the numbers was to keep these big men on the field for almost 40 minutes while the Eagles offense under Patullo was maintaining its uncanny knack for three-and-outs. With all of that talent, the Eagles offense ranks 24th in the NFL right now.
And here’s one more thing to consider. Sirianni was in a similar situation two years ago, when his team went from 10-1 to out of the playoffs in the first round by losing the last six of seven games. He never found a way back once the team began its historic collapse.
In other words, the last guy I would consult on why a team with so much talent could implode like this is the bozo who presided over its demise in 2023. Yes, he won a Super Bowl last year, but that roster was so good – and the coordinators so adept – even Sirianni couldn’t find a way to screw it up.
Now that we have established, with irrefutable logic, that Patullo is the biggest reason for the imminent demise of the 2025 Eagles, the only way back would be to remove Patullo from his OC role, if not from the team entirely.
We know Sirianni won’t do that. He’s already on the record saying he thinks his buddy is actually doing a good job. At the same time, the head coach is a consummate yes man, so that decision is important only until his bosses, owner Jeff Lurie and GM Howie Roseman, tell him otherwise.
Obviously, they need to do so before the game next Monday night in Los Angeles against the Chargers. They need to find anyone – even a trained seal, if one is available – who would represent an upgrade over the feckless fool currently calling plays. They need to fix this mess.
And this all leads to the final element in this nightmare – the fans. Unlike Sirianni, they know what they see. The boos cascading from the upper reaches of the Linc throughout the game were a startling reminder that sometimes the paying customers know more than the people standing on the sideline.
Maybe Lurie and Roseman – grim-faced in their luxury box watching one failed series after another on Friday – could not believe what their eyes were seeing. Well, then, we can only hope they believed their ears when those thunderous boos shook the stadium.
If Patullo is too incompetent to figure out how to call plays, the fans felt the immediate need to make a loud statement. If Sirianni is too boneheaded to see what anyone with eyes and/or a TV can see, the fans took all of the guesswork out of the situation.
God bless the fans. God bless a city that refuses to accept failure. God bless a fan base that appears, all too often, to be thinking more clearly than the coaches.
Kevin Patullo is not just a problem for the Eagles offense anymore. He’s a problem for everyone who cares about the team.
The infection that started with close wins despite Patullo’s ineptitude early in the season has spread now, into shocking mistakes and terrible losses.
How will it end?
Well, if Patullo is still holding a play sheet on the sideline next Monday night, you already know how it will end.
The Eagles have a week to right a wrong and give themselves one last chance to repeat as champions.
No, I’m not done complaining yet. . . .
- Sirianni did it again with another stupid strategic decision that sealed the loss. This time, he decided to go for two, down 26-15 with 3:10 left in the game. The conversion failed, leaving the Eagles still down two scores. The ensuing onside kick also failed, inevitably. I don’t know what analytics says. I know what makes sense. You kick the extra point and make it a one-score game. Afterwards, the coach said he likes to know how many points he needs. Brilliant.
- The Tush Push has been Sirianni’s best play for several seasons now, but it’s becoming less effective the more the Eagles use it. When Hurts got stripped in the pile on Friday, it was a wake-up call to get more creative with short-yardage strategy. Of course, with these coaches, good luck with that.
- Am I the only fan getting sick of the media blaming Hurts for everything? The guy just won a Super Bowl, would have won two if Jonathan Gannon knew how to coach defense, and now the opinion-makers are upset because he wants to run less. Maybe the QB sees what I see. It’s a lot more effective, and much safer, to throw the ball to A.J. Brown. No?
- The Eagles schedule this season sucks. Here we go again, with another long break between Friday and next Monday — 10 long days. It was 15 when the Eagles had their bye, then another Monday night game the following week. At $62 mill a year, commissioner Roger Goodell should be able to find people who are better at making NFL schedules.
- Maybe it’s just me, but all of these TV commercials starring Saquon Barkley are not connecting because this season, well, he’s not very good at his job. I’m not buying any Barkley-endorsed insurance, soda, sneakers, pizza, doughnuts, soda or razor blades until he starts scoring touchdowns again. Especially not razor blades. I prefer having no sharp objects around me while the Eagles are playing like this.