Eagles

I Hate this Answer from Nick Sirianni

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Dec 13th, 2023 · 11:07 AM EST

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Nick Sirianni was asked about targets at his Tuesday press conference:

Q. A lot has been (made) of TE Dallas Goedert, WR A.J. Brown and WR DeVonta Smith getting the majority share of the targets in the last game. How do you get some of these other guys like WR Julio Jones and WR Quez Watkins, involved to spread the ball out, and what were the Cowboys doing to allow that to happen so it wouldn’t get the ball to them?(Chris Franklin)

NICK SIRIANNI: Our passing game runs through three guys. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to get the ball to some other guys here and there, but the main passing game goes through those guys. The Cowboys and the style of defense they run, which is obviously a very good defense, allows you to kind of get the ball to where we were going with it.

That’s where the ball was designed to go. It has nothing to do with anything else. We wanted to get A.J. going. We wanted to get DeVonta and Dallas the ball. Every plan is thought of through that. I’ve said that from the very beginning.

That was our plan in that game, and obviously we didn’t win the game. We didn’t play well enough on offense. We didn’t coach well enough on offense. That was by design to throw those guys the football, and that’s why the football went there.

We wrote about this yesterday. Brown, Smith, and Goedert have 70.4% of Jalen Hurts’ targets this season, and were the only three players targeted in Dallas. D’Andre Swift and Kenny Gainwell have 18% on the year and the other 11.5% is spread out over the rest of the group.

Nobody is going to sit here and tell you that getting Quez Watkins more involved is the key to winning the Super Bowl, but that answer from Sirianni confirms that Quez and the rest of the group don’t matter. “Our passing game runs through three guys.” Okay, so Watkins, Julio Jones, Olamide Zaccheaus, Jack Stoll, Grant Calcaterra, and Albert O are… completely useless? Glorified blockers? Dummy route runners? Chopped liver?

You look at the rest of the NFL and the pattern is consistent. You’ve got WR1 and WR2, a tight end, and RB1 getting the bulk of the targets. That’s how Dallas and San Francisco operate. But the Eagles run a lot of slow-developing routes and they don’t get their running backs too many designed targets (screens and whatnot), so you take what Sirianni said and combine that with their schematic approach, and it makes the whole thing feel a little weird. I’ve got no issue with Brown, Smith, and Goedert being the big dogs, but you can do that without telling the media that everybody else is a bystander.

Imagine if Nick Foles didn’t throw the ball to Torrey Smith and Corey Clement in the Super Bowl.