Despite Skid, The Philadelphia Eagles Like Where They Are; Jalen Hurts ‘Trending In The Right Direction’

No, when the Philadelphia Eagles were 13-1, the team probably didn’t envision a future that included uncertainty over who would start at quarterback and a game against the New York Giants on Sunday that matters for Philadelphia, but not New York.

Zoom back a bit, though, and Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni sees it differently. If he’d been given the chance to sign up for a Week 18 home game, and win, to put the Eagles into the top seed in the NFC playoffs?

“Yeah, of course you would say, ‘Heck yeah, where do I sign up?’”, Sirianni told reporters Friday. “That’s where we are, and so our job is to go out there and execute. Our job is to go out there and coach our butts off to give ourselves a chance to win this week. Then we’ll take that one play at a time.”

Accordingly, a palpable sense of optimism about the way the Eagles are trending heading into Sunday’s vital game was clear in many of Sirianni’s answers, along with the practice availability of key players, just 48 hours ahead of the matchup against New York.

Foremost on everyone’s mind is Jalen Hurts, of course, who missed the last two games — both losses in which the Eagles’ offense struggled — but has been taking first-team snaps all week in preparation for Sunday, all while navigating his shoulder injury.

“It’s trending in the right direction,” Sirianni said Friday. “Again, we’re going to see how today goes. He’s trending in the right direction. We feel good about it. We have to see how today goes.”

That is not to say that Philadelphia can simply plug Hurts back into action and expect the same things from him, the MVP-level player who drove them to a 13-1 start. Offensive coordinator Shane Steichen acknowledged that Thursday — that if Hurts plays, the way he is utilized will have to be altered to account for his injury.

“I mean if he is playing, yeah,” Steichen told reporters. “We always will have a plan for that, yep.”

Still, just having Hurts playing will buoy the offense, and it appears running back Miles Sanders will as well, though the primary option in the Philadelphia backfield has been forced to navigate a dual minefield — a knee injury that limited him in practice, and the fate of his close friend, Damar Hamlin, who fortunately is trending in the right direction as well.

“I think [RB] Miles [Sanders] has had a good week of mental preparation, and also a good week of practice,” Sirianni said Friday. “Obviously, you guys can talk to Miles about it. I don’t want to ever speak for him, especially in something like this, but I can’t imagine what he had to go through mentally this week because I know they’re really close.

“So, we just tried to be there for Miles. I could see the guys put their arm around Miles and, we’re just thrilled obviously and thankful that [Buffalo Bills S] Damar [Hamlin] is getting better first and foremost. But you tend to think about your guys also in that scenario.

“So, I think Miles had a great week of preparation, and sometimes when you come in this building or you go out to the field, there is an escape from some of the things that you might be having to go through. I think the thing that you find out in these moments is just how precious everything is, how precious life is.”

On the defensive side of the ball, the Eagles could get a chance to see safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson play. This will matter both because Gardner-Johnson is the team’s best safety, and therefore vital in a must-win game, but also because it gives him a chance to get game-speed reps ahead of the playoffs.

“He’s doing a good job,” Sirianni said of Gardner-Johnson Friday. “Again, we’ll see how today’s practice goes and how everything goes throughout today’s practice, but he’s done a nice job and we’re hopeful.

“Again, I won’t say that he is yet. I want to see what goes down at practice today. But we’re hopeful there. We’ll see what happens. He’s had a good week of practice as well.”

Sirianni said that applied to his team writ large, a vital show of strength and the most important time of the year.

“I’ve noticed at practice this week that’s it’s business as usual,” he said. “It’s the dawg mentality. I’ve drug myself through the mud for each and every one of us of what happened and held ourselves accountable to what happened in that football game, and then I move on and I fix those things in attempts to get better, and now I’m just worried about one day at a time.

“To me, I felt like we had a really crisp practice yesterday. We had a great walk-through the day before. What I felt like it’s just been, ‘Hey, here we are. We’re here. We’re here. We’re here. We’re here. We’re not worried about there. We fixed what happened here.’ Because dawg mentality is not like, ‘Hey, here. You forget about this,’ — and this is the past, this is the future.”

What that future looks like will be largely determined by the present.