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Unless He’s a Total Liar, Jonathan Gannon Apparently Deserves Some Credit for Getting the Eagles’ Offense Going
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Zak Keefer wrote an article for The Athletic titled Amid injury and low expectations, Cardinals’ Jonathan Gannon takes his ‘one shot’. Surely Eagles fans won’t care because Gannon is Satan and public enemy number one, but this Birds-related passage is fascinating:
“Seven games into the 2021 season, Nick Sirianni – the Eagles head coach who’d brought Gannon with him from Indianapolis – stormed into a meeting, venting about how he wasn’t sure he could call the offense and manage the game how he needed to. At that point, the Eagles were 2-5.
“So give the play-calling to Shane,” Gannon suggested, referring to offensive coordinator Shane Steichen.
“Well, they’re gonna look at me like I’m a failure,” Gannon remembers Sirianni saying.
“Who gives a f-?” Gannon replied. “We’re gonna get fired if we’re 3-14.”
Sirianni handed offensive play-calling duties to Steichen, then came into his own as a head coach. The Eagles took off. And just like he had at every previous stop, Gannon learned by watching his boss work. “Nick was phenomenal,” says Gannon, who used to call him “Captain Chaos” in Indy because Sirianni was such a hothead on the practice field. A year after bowing out in the wild-card round of the playoffs, the Eagles went 14-3, earned the NFC’s top seed, then won their first two playoff games by a combined 55 points.
“Who gives a fuck?”
Brilliant!
This is a fascinating development. Looks like Gannon is a reason, perhaps the main reason, for Sirianni handing play calling duties over to Shane Steichen. We would need to go back and do a Sal Pal forensic investigation to determine who first made this suggestion, and when exactly Sirianni was swayed. But for now we give credit to Gannon for telling Sirianni to turn over play calling to Steichen, which made things run a lot more smoothly on the offensive side of the ball. Steichen and Jalen Hurts got into a rhythm, Sirianni was free to manage the game, and had fewer things to juggle at the same time. Then the Birds started winning games and ultimately went to the Super Bowl, before everything crapped out in the second half.
It’s #QGannon once again, unless he just completely made this shit up.
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