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Tell Your Dad and Uncles that Nick Sirianni is Doing More Camp Conditioning this Year
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One of the annual summer Eagles complaints is that practices are too soft these days.
Not enough hitting, short sessions, lack of conditioning. They’re not ready for Week 1, according to your dad and uncles, who remember when football was a contact sport.
Good news for them:
Nick Sirianni says he is pushing his team more with conditioning this camp. He is looking for toughness.
Parris Campbell on Varsity House podcast said teammates told him camp is tougher this year because of the Eagles collapse last year pic.twitter.com/MfJpj2TyTM
— John Clark (@JClarkNBCS) July 29, 2024
Here’s the full quote from Sirianni, who was asked if the conditioning focus was his doing:
“Yeah, so, obviously one thing that’s really important to us is that we play with relentless effort. And with great toughness. And with great detail. Toughness and detail, those are part of our core values. You can’t play with relentless effort without being in great shape. You can’t play with great detail without being in great shape. You can’t have population to the football on defense where they’re constantly running to the football, without being in great shape. So yeah, we’ve made a push there in terms of doing some extra conditioning. And conditioning doesn’t have to look like gassers, right, like when you line up on the line and just back and forth. It can look different, whether it’s in periods – I actually got the idea of the period we’re doing from my buddy from high school, that he used to do in wrestling. It’s kind of a simulation of what they do in wrestling, what he does with his team, he’s a high school football coach now, and a couple other of our guys on staff have done a version of this too and it’s good for us because we’re getting plays while we’re conditioning. We’re getting work on our detail while conditioning. And so again, to be able to do what we want to do and play to our core details of detail and toughness, we have to be in great shape.”
Remember running suicides back in the day? They don’t call them that anymore because we’re all so sensitive. You weren’t actually going to kill yourself, you just briefly considered it while sucking wind. At some point we started calling them “mad dogs,” but it seems to depend on where you grew up. Gassers, suicides, mad dogs, whatever. Bottom line is that they were all miserable.
The modern-day approach is what Sirianni describes. You don’t just line up and run wind sprints back and forth on the football field. Everything is integrated so that you’re getting cardio and conditioning while doing live-ball exercises and/or incorporating game situations into the routine. 25 years ago you ran a bunch of sprints and then finally got to actually kick a ball or throw a ball. Now they find more practical ways to do it all together.
Beyond that, it’s hard for fans and media to measure conditioning beyond seeing Linval Joseph getting air in the 3rd quarter. The Eagles haven’t lost an opener since 2020, so it’s not like they’ve looked unprepared in Week 1 during Nick Sirianni’s tenure. That’s not to say they can’t be in better physical shape, because everybody can.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com