An underrated aspect of Sirianni's job that Lurie really appreciates

PHOENIX — Earlier this offseason, Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni called owner Jeffrey Lurie to deliver an update.

“I just finished my 12th interview for linebackers coach,” Sirianni told his boss.

That’s after Sirianni had already promoted Brian Johnson to offensive coordinator and hired Sean Desai as the Eagles’ defensive coordinator. And all in a truncated offseason after the Eagles played in the Super Bowl on Feb. 12.

You can just picture Lurie smiling on the other end of the phone.

“These are grinding interviews,” Lurie said on Tuesday evening at the annual NFL owners meetings. “He knows more than I would know about what those interviews are like. But they’re not, ‘Oh hi, nice to meet you.’ These are grinding interviews.”

Eventually, Sirianni hired former Temple defensive coordinator D.J. Eliot to coach linebackers under Desai. And then he went through a similar process to hire another assistant coach on the defensive side.

Lurie called Sirianni “relentless” in his search to hire the best coaches, saying that’s exactly what he wants from his head coach.

“And that’s big,” Lurie said. “Because when you’re successful, I don’t have to tell you guys, you’re going to lose a lot of staff and you’re going to lose them quickly. You’ve got to not just rely on connections in terms of who you know, who you’ve worked with, who gave you a job beforehand. Those are rules that we don’t really believe in and we think there’s an advantage to having a head coach who truly does the due diligence and is sort of a grinder at it.”

The Eagles needed to replenish this offseason after offensive coordinator Shane Steichen took the head coaching job in Indianapolis and defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon took the head coaching job in Arizona.

After just two seasons with his initial coaching staff, Sirianni found himself in a position where he needed to fill several extremely important roles. Lurie feels confident that Sirianni’s process was done the right way.

For all the great things Sirianni’s predecessor Doug Pederson did as the Eagles’ head coach — he’s the only guy to deliver a Lombardi Trophy to Philadelphia — he struggled to reload his coaching staff after his assistants moved on.

In fact, it was a disagreement between Pederson and Lurie about the coaching staff that partially lead to Pederson’s firing after the 2020 season. You’ll remember that Pederson reportedly wanted to promote Press Taylor to offensive coordinator and Matt Burke to defensive coordinator. And Lurie didn’t think that was good enough.

It’s clear that Sirianni’s philosophy on hiring coaches falls more in line with what Lurie wants from his head coach. Sirianni interviews a ton of candidates and does even more background work on those candidates. He said this week that he’ll call 30-40 references for a single coach.

And in many cases, it has led Sirianni to hire coaches he has never worked with before.

“I love that. That’s much more what I believe in,” Lurie explained. “That familial kind of approach, the nepotistic type of approach, you see it a lot and you gotta try to avoid that. There’s so many great coaches. And another plus for him was bringing in Brian Johnson, who he didn’t even know. And we got into this position where Shane (Steichen) got hired and we’ve got an outstanding young coach there.”

Lurie said that Sirianni told him during the season how great Johnson was and the Eagles were worried about losing Johnson to other teams that were interested in hiring him as their offensive coordinator. But the timing worked out when Steichen was hired by the Colts and even though the Eagles went through a brief interview process, they knew Johnson was their guy.

But Lurie’s bigger point was that Sirianni didn’t know Johnson before 2021. He just happened to be the best candidate for the job and he hired him. The process to hire the defensive coordinator was a little more involved this offseason but the Eagles feel good about the Desai hire.

The reason they feel good about it is because of the process.

“This is something I really appreciate about him,” Lurie said. “He not only grinds on football and on connections and on culture. But when it came time and this was a first for him, when it came time to figure out who’s going to replace the coordinator you lost, he was relentless.”

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