The Eagles started last season with a 2-5 record and heard plenty of people count them out of the playoff race before they closed with a 7-3 mark and a spot in the postseason as a Wild Card team.
Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni wasn’t speaking specifically about that team during his Wednesday press conference when he said “every year that a team starts slow and they build” their way into playoff shape, but he used it as a comparison to teams that start with a string of wins and then fade away over the course of the season.
That’s a fate the Eagles would like to avoid after an impressive win over the Vikings lifted them to 2-0 on the year. Sirianni said on Wednesday that he believes the best approach to doing so is doing exactly what the Eagles did a year ago.
“We just talked about competing and last week was a little bit about connecting and this week is a lot about competing,” Sirianni said. “So, it was competing, and it was about — any time we start on Wednesday, I’m going to talk about the weekly process or the importance of practice or this or that and we talked about the weekly process and not skipping steps or anything like that. I think when you focus on — so the compete, the not skipping steps and the attention to detail, I think when you focus on the process of the week and all those things, you don’t get affected by the outside noise. Obviously, people are telling us how good we are now. Whether it was last year at this time people are telling us how bad we were, right.”
Sirianni said he’s not worried about the team taking its eye of the ball because most of their captains” know what it takes to get to the top of the mountain and plant that Eagle flag at the top of the mountain” and they’ll get a chance to show that nothing’s gone to their heads against the Commanders this week.