Nick Sirianni is staring down the barrel of history after his Philadelphia Eagles handed away a game they had locked up in London on Sunday. Three NFL head coaches before him , Robert Saleh for the Jets in 2024, Joe Philbin for the Dolphins in 2015, and Dennis Allen for the Raiders in 2014 , all found themselves out of a job after losing in London early in the season. With the Eagles now sitting at 2-3, everyone’s wondering if Sirianni could be the fourth to get the boot.
How Do You Blow a 99-Percent Win? Ask the Eagles.
Seriously, this game should have been in the bag. Philadelphia had Sunday’s first game, a London date with the Jaguars, as locked down as you could possibly get without actually being in victory formation. There were just eight seconds on the clock. They had a one-point lead, and they were kicking off. Jacksonville had zero timeouts and absolutely no offensive momentum. This was a classic 99-percent-chance-of-victory scenario. So, naturally, the Eagles blew it. Philadelphia kicked the ball straight into the hands of Ameer Abdullah, who somehow charged 48 meters, or 53 yards in American terms, right over that British turf. That massive kick return put the Jaguars in perfect range to hit a game-winning field goal, and boom, game over.
The “Ifs” That Will Haunt Sirianni All the Way Home
You can’t spell failure without “if,” and the Eagles left a whole dictionary of them on that field. If Philadelphia had simply kicked the ball out of the end zone, the Jaguars would have had mere seconds to try and move the ball downfield and stop the clock. If the Eagles had just managed to keep Abdullah tied up for one more agonizing second, the clock would have expired and the game would have been theirs. And rewind a bit further, if Philadelphia hadn’t thrown an incomplete pass deep in Jaguars territory with 25 seconds left, or if they hadn’t run out of bounds with 21 seconds left, they could have actually run the clock down to just one second before kicking their own go-ahead field goal. So many “ifs,” so many missed chances, all leading to what has to be the quietest, longest flight home ever.
After the game, Sirianni didn’t mince words. He told the assembled media, “I didn’t make the right decision. I lost us that game. No other way around it. Nothing else to say about it. I didn’t do my job good enough in that situation.” What makes this whole debacle even more infuriating is that the Jaguars had practically given the Eagles a blueprint earlier in the game. On the opening play, Philadelphia kicked off to Josh Cameron, who scooted 82 meters, or 90 yards, for what looked like an opening touchdown. That play was called back due to penalties, but the Jaguars clearly learned a valuable lesson that would pay off a full 60 minutes later. Abdullah himself said it after the game: “We got the perfect call with the perfect kick. We knew we could hit them in the alleys. That’s the one Josh Cameron had one called back earlier in the game. So we knew if we got the right kick, we had an opportunity.” Unlike Philadelphia, the Jaguars didn’t botch their opportunity to win. The Eagles were already flailing coming into this game after two straight losses, and now they are really going to have to figure out what happens next.
This article was created with AI assistance and published under Seattle On Tap’s editorial standards. See our Editorial Policy.
Originally reported by Yahoo Sports.
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