Nick Sirianni

Q. Nick, we’ve tried every way to try to get you to tell us if you’re going to play the starters. Shout out to reporter Dave Uram for trying it the other night. So I’ll try this way: let’s say you were talking to a pregame producer, and he needed to decide whether you were going to have the starter graphics or the guys that aren’t. What would you say? (Rob Kuestner)

NICK SIRIANNI: Same thing I said to you guys. We’ll see. You go through these practices. You go through the week. We’ve had a good three days of practices. Looking to get our fourth one in here today.

We have to see what it’s like after this and how guys are feeling. They don’t particularly know exactly what we’re doing yet, so they deserve to know before anybody else.

Q. Will the weather have anything to do with it? (Rob Kuestner)

NICK SIRIANNI: We’ll see. Everything is always taken — you’re asking the weather? — everything is always taken into account. We would be foolish not to take everything into account, and we will take everything into account, including weather.

Q. So, if it’s a bad weather night, that could change what you do? (Howard Eskin)

NICK SIRIANNI: Yeah, we’ll see. Yeah, everything will be taken into account, yes.

Q. The forecast is pretty serious out there. So, have you had talks with the Ravens or the league about the safety of potentially playing something? (Dave Uram)

NICK SIRIANNI: We’re ready to go and go play. We’ll see what happens. Those are things that are out of our control. We’ll play. If they say we play, we play. If they say we don’t, we don’t.

We’ll see how it goes. We’ll monitor it. We always get ready for wet weather games the way we do some things in walk-through, the way we do some things in practice.

We did some things yesterday as far as our operation in kicking with the weather and with the ball.

Q. How has your philosophy changed over time in the league about the value of those limited snaps that starters get? (Jeff Neiburg)

NICK SIRIANNI: Every year is a little bit different. The first year in ’21 we played our guys in the first game. I think was that against the Steelers, one or two series? I think one or two series the first game against the Steelers.

Then the plan was to play the next game. We didn’t for some circumstances that happened. Then the 2022 we played the starters for a drive. ’23 we didn’t.

Everything is a little bit different based off of when you play, how many practices you’ve had before the game, all those different things. So, everything is taken into account.

You have some general philosophies of what you think, but you have general philosophies for a lot of things, but those are constantly changing and evolving.

Q. Do you want QB Jalen Hurts to be more hot this year versus the blitz? (Jeff McLane)

NICK SIRIANNI: We’re working through different ways to handle the blitz. Of course, hot answers are one answer. Throwing quick is another answer. There’s multiple answers that you have.

We want to be able to be multiple, and we want to be able to handle the blitz.

Q. Is that a yeah? (Jeff McLane)

NICK SIRIANNI: I said we were working it, so yes.

Q. When you look back at Offensive Coordinator Kellen Moore’s history, what stands out about his play calling? (Dave Zangaro)

NICK SIRIANNI: Again, I just think he has a really good flow of how to do it. He really sees into the quarterback’s vision– him playing quarterback at a very high level– sees into the quarterback’s vision and how he sees it.

Again, just when to call the big play, when to run the football, when to play action. It’s just his feel and flow for the game.

Those are conversations. You could put a game on and see that, but those happen more — you never know exactly what they’re thinking unless you go through an interview with them or unless you have these personal conversations with them.

That’s where you’re getting a lot of the information as far as how Kellen [Moore] calls it and how you feel comfortable about how he calls it.

Q. What’s the approach for kickoffs in the preseason? (Zach Berman)

NICK SIRIANNI: Yeah, we’ll see how we do that. We have a plan. We have a plan. You’ll see in a couple of days.

Q. When it comes to the younger players, it seems to us, and correct me if I’m wrong, that maybe WR Ainias Smith is fighting the football a little bit. Couple drops. How do you address that? How do you try to build back that confidence? (John McMullen)

NICK SIRIANNI: When you go out to play any practice, any game, you always want to be detailed in everything that you do. That starts with knowing what to do, your assignment. Being in the right spot, getting to the right check, getting to the right location, doing the right thing.

Then it comes down to the detail of the fundamental. You know, the tackling, the catching, the block destruction, the combo blocks, the blocking. All those different things are in place.

So, what we’re looking for every day is– so many plays go wrong because something goes wrong with the detail. Now, sometimes you lose a one-on-one battle. That’s going to happen. Everybody is really good in this league.

But when you look at a lot of the majority of plays that don’t go right, it’s about a detail that happened. Did somebody not do the right thing? Did the coach not call the right thing in the right situation? Were our fundamentals bad?

That’s something, any time you come out here, we’re looking to perfect because we know if we can perfect the tackling — what limits big plays? Being on the same page on defense and tackling the ball carrier and getting off blocks. Those are fundamentals, right?

What creates big plays on offense? Well, being on the right page in protection, the catch, the blocking up front. So, it’s always about fundamentals. That’s what we’re looking for in everybody that plays.

So, what we’re doing when we go in there and correct a fundamental, it’s always about, ‘Hey, you dropped this pass. Why?’ ‘You didn’t get off this block. Why?’

Because the worst coaching point in the world — and I hate this coaching point, and I hate hearing this — is ‘catch the ball.’ Well, I tried to. ‘Get off the block.’ I tried to. How, right? That’s what’s talked about in the meeting room. That’s what’s fixed in the meeting room.

You mentioned Ainias [Smith]. ‘Hey, you dropped this ball that was low. Were your hands a little bit apart? Did you try to turn up the field? Let me show you. Here’s the proper fundamental. Here’s the proper fundamental to get off a block,’ and now we have unbelievable players on our team and so much tape at our disposal because now we can go, ‘Okay, Ainias, watch [WR] A.J. [Brown], how his pinkies are together when the ball is below his waist,’ ‘Watch A.J. when he goes to the ground and instead of going to the ground and letting the ball pop out, he gets to his back.’

It’s those little details. If I hear one of my coaches say, ‘Catch it,’ I’m upset because it’s about how you do it, and that’s what we go about in that film room. That’s how we go about correcting things like fundamentals because it’s in the fundamentals.

It’s in the detail that you win games and that you win plays.

Details are really important to me, so that’s why I took a little extra time on your question.

Q. (Regarding why it was important for head coach Nick Sirianni take accountability for last season during a team meeting in the spring 2024)…(Bo Wulf)

NICK SIRIANNI: Sure. Accountability, right? The only way to get better is to really look through the things that you felt like you messed up and get better at them, right? It starts with the humility to say, ‘I messed this up, I need to be better at this.’

If you want a culture of accountability and you’re not being accountable yourself — let me rephrase this. If I want Taylor Sirianni to be accountable — I actually just talked about this to our staff today– If I want Taylor Sirianni to be accountable and she sees me blaming things on other people at all times, I’m raising a child that’s not going to be accountable. Well, it’s the same thing with a team.

If I’m not accountable to the things that I mess up, how am I going to expect them to be accountable to what they mess up? So that’s been day one here. That’s just not offseason 2024 going into the ’24 season. That’s been what I’ve tried to do since day one.

I think that our world is dying for accountability in a world where there are so many things that you can blame things on. I’ve said this before. One of the most proud I’ve ever been of this team is after a loss in the Super Bowl. Everyone was trying to give us an out. The field was really bad, right?

The response of our players to that, ‘No, they had to play on it too.’ ‘But that call on [CB James] Bradberry, that’s what lost it.’ ‘No, you know, it was a series of plays.’ ‘But what about this?’ And what about that? And what about how,’ — like, it was everybody was trying to hand us an excuse, and they just kept going back to, ‘No, accountability.’

That’s the culture that we want to have. That’s the family I want to have as accountability, and accountability is just so important. If you don’t have accountability, then you’re not going to get better because you’re not going to recognize the mistakes that you made.

That’s what we want from this team. Any meeting that we start out that I feel like I made a mistake on, I’m going to make sure I bring it up. It’s not just me up there fixing corrections in front of the team after each practice.

I’m saying, ‘Hey, [reporter] Eliot [Shorr-Parks], you play wide receiver. You screwed this up. Do you want to play wideout?’ Right? ‘[reporter] Bo, [Wulf] you play quarterback. You screwed this up.’ No. It’s, ‘Hey, Kellen [Moore], this is not the right call.’

Everybody is accountable. We’re all accountable, and that’s the only way to get better, and I firmly believe that.

Q. T Mekhi Becton was ahead of G/T Tyler Steen yesterday. Is that because G/T Tyler Steen is still limited, or is that some sort of shift that we saw before the injury? (Jeff McLane)

NICK SIRIANNI: We don’t have to make a decision quite on that yet, obviously. They’re still battling for who is going to play at that position. Really have high hopes for both of them, and we’ll see how that plays out.

Q. But before G/T Tyler Steen’s injury, he had all the reps at first team right guard. (Jeff McLane)

NICK SIRIANNI: Yeah, it’s not a shift. We’re still battling, and they were this battling before that as well, regardless of the reps.

Q. What kind of steps did you take to get on the same page with QB Jalen Hurts during the offseason? (Tim McManus)

NICK SIRIANNI: Yeah, go through all the same processes that we go through after each year, and Jalen and I are in a really good place. Every relationship that you have needs work, with everybody, and we’ve always continued to try to work at that.