One of the random storylines for Sunday’s unexciting Eagles/Jets game is the presence of Joe Flacco, who was a Bird for about five seconds this season. He had a cup of coffee with the Eagles, but he knows the offense and the verbiage and all of that stuff.

He’s a local guy but playing for the enemy, so surely he wouldn’t rat us out, would he? Would he be the “gnawing, teething, frickin’ rat” that Jack Nicholson once lamented in the 2006 film The Departed?

Nick Sirianni was asked that question on Friday, but in a much more professional way:

Q.You guys obviously had Jets QB Joe Flacco for the first half of the year. He knows your quarterback room really well. Do you have to change verbiage or anything like that?(Martin Frank)

Nick Sirianni: You know, that’s a good question, because there are a lot of times where you go to these great lengths to change verbiage and you screw yourself up.

But then, there is a fine line in saying, ‘Hey, we can really get them with this.’ So, you know, it’s just – my experience is you go in there and you throw them off a couple times, and then they got to be – maybe all the defensive linemen will come back to Joe and be like, ‘That’s not what that is.’

And so, you do enough to throw them off. I think you don’t go overboard to where you screw yourself up.

But we been doing a lot of these things at the line of scrimmage for a lot of years together, right, with [Eagles Offensive Coordinator] Shane [Steichen] and myself and [Eagles Passing Game Coordinator] Kevin [Patullo], and so we have backup words that we have been practicing and that we use.

So, if they’re listening, we’re going to have a couple things that will mess them up. But again, you don’t want to go overboard there. So, it’s a fight – you avoid all extremes at both ends of the situation.

It’s interesting to think about. You have guys that go from place to place during the offseason, and maybe they can share some notes about teammates, i.e. their habits and tendencies and things like that. But Flacco was an in-season trade, from a new coaching staff to another new coaching staff, and you’d think all of his knowledge is more fresh and relevant. It would hold up.

Hopefully Flacco does the right thing, and doesn’t give up any secrets about his hometown team