Eagles and Cowboys fans stare into the abyss (and find it staring right back)

That above bit about the abyss staring back is a quote from Nietzsche, who, it turns out, is not that scary-looking Packers linebacker from when i was a kid, but some sort of philosopher from Germany.

Nietzsche apparently meant something like how the stuff you struggle against helps form what you become; be careful that you don’t get so absorbed in the fight that you adopt the values you loathe.

Not having been much of a philosophy student, I heard the quote long before I looked up the meaning. In the interim, I thought Nietzsche just meant that if we contemplate things that are beyond our comprehension, we aren’t going to find answers, just more questions. That is along the lines of what I’m thinking about right now, and Nietzsche is just gonna hafta adapt. Or start his own football blog.

At present, it’s beyond my comprehension that the 12-5 Dallas Cowboys and the 11-6 Eagles are out of the NFL playoffs, each having performed dismally in last weekend’s Wild Card Round. And the more I ponder each team’s demise, the more questions I have.

If you turn back the calendar a few months, both teams were among everyone’s top three in the NFC, and most lists of the top tier of Super Bowl contenders. Dallas, as it rolled to the NFC East championship and NFC second seed, seemed ready to make a deep playoff run, right up until the playoffs actually started. If there were any signs of trouble, they had to do with how the high-scoring Cowboys tended to fare much better at home than on the road — but they weren’t going to play on the road before the Super Bowl, unless they met the top-seeded 49ers in the NFC Championship Game.

Instead, Dallas’s 16-game home win streak ended with a blowout loss to novice QB Jordan Love and the seventh-seeded Packers, a team most observers hadn’t considered a serious threat. Everything the Cowboys seemed to have solved in the regular season unsolved itself, as owner/GM/circus master Jerry Jones looked on from his suite in agonized disbelief.

Dak Prescott ended the best season of his eight-year career by reverting to the guy who turns the ball over when it matters most, his two interceptions including a killer pick-six that made the score 27-0. Dan Quinn, the defensive coordinator who made that unit one of the league’s best and most consistent, saw Love lead touchdown drive after touchdown drive, to the point where the Packers actually sat the young phenom down before he could hang a 50-burger on Dallas.

It seems that a quarter-century of Dallas playoff futility has gotten into the current players’ heads. I don’t know how Jerry puts his team back together, especially since I feel as a lot of NFL observers do — that the root of the problem is Jerry. He wants to put on a glitzy, gaudy show, with his visage front and center, and then also to win, as a secondary consideration.

Eagles fans were giddy, watching their most hated rival’s demise. But most of them nonetheless remained clear-eyed about their own team’s chances in Tampa Monday night against a middling Bucs team that overachieved just by making the playoffs. The Eagles stopped playing as a cohesive team several weeks ago; they hit the postseason having lost five of six, following a horseshoe-up-the-keister 10-1 start that nobody believed was for real.

To me, this debacle is a bit easier to explain than what happened to Dallas. Just as shocking, when you pan back and look at the long view, but easier to dissect. The 10-1 Eagles were promptly blown out by the 49ers and Cowboys, back-to-back weeks. I think what happened after that was, players were shocked. They’d been operating under the assumption that they were a supremely talented team, one that just needed to be less careless, a little more tuned into detail. They’d been the more talented team in the Super Bowl last February, despite losing to Kansas City by three points because their defensive coordinator had nine toes out the door, and they assumed NFC domination was their destiny.

They found out otherwise. They discovered their defense was a toothless sham, and their offense was not, as they had assumed, unstoppable. They looked to the coaching staff for answers and the only thing they got was a defensive coordinator switch from Sean Desai to Matt Patricia. Patricia tried to change a lot of stuff, 13 games into the season, which totally destroyed whatever was left of the defense’s poise and confidence. Also, the changes he sought were flat-out stupid, like dropping Haason Reddick into coverage more often.

When players suddenly realize, “these guys we’re following don’t know what the bleep they’re doing,” the players don’t quit, exactly, but they do pull back. They hesitate. They aren’t confident in what they are being asked to do, so they sort of tiptoe into it. “Hey, we’re running that bubble screen again, here goes nothing.”

And nothing is what you get.

There are personnel problems here — the defense needs to get younger and faster, which isn’t going to be easy. Retirements are about to open a huge leadership gulf. But the bigger problem, as we saw Monday night with Troy Aikman excoriating the schemes and play calls, is strategy. And a coaching staff that doesn’t make anybody better.

I’ll be shocked if the defensive staff isn’t fired en masse. And I’m pretty sure there will be an offensive revamp. But it’s Nick Sirianni’s offense. If you make it some new coordinator’s offense, what is the reason for keeping Nick around, exactly?

We’ve seen Sirianni try to turn this around over a seven-week period. If he stumbled upon one decent idea during that time, I missed it. He looks and sounds baffled. If I’m Jeffrey Lurie, I don’t know how I summon the confidence to entrust another season to a guy who managed to lose A.J. and Sydney Brown in a meaningless game.

There is no positive case for keeping Sirianni. There is a negative case — you’re firing a coach who has made the playoffs each of his three seasons, who took you to the Super Bowl a year ago. From a distance, this will look like irrationality, panic. Pundits will make fun. You’ll have to endure that.

Also, Lurie is a deliberate thinker who reveres process. He never shoots from the hip. His previous coach firings all came at the end of dismal seasons. He had people researching candidates, he thought he knew what qualities were needed in the new guy. This time, I can’t beiieve Lurie had any idea a month ago that he might be making a head coaching change. I doubt the homework has been done. For this reason alone, Sirianni might survive.

But that’s a bullshit reason that risks having Jalen Hurts regress further. When was the last time “let’s give the coach one more year” produced anything but disaster? Lurie went that way in 2011, when Andy Reid’s “dream team” started 4-8 but finished 8-8. The next season the Eagles closed a 4-12 year by dropping 11 of 12 — looking very much like this team down the stretch — and Reid was gone, after 14 seasons.

If he does pull the trigger, Lurie has a type — youngish, offensive-minded, not an NFL head coaching retread. This time around, the highest-profile candidates — Bill Belichick, Pete Carroll, Jim Harbaugh and Mike Vrabel — do not fit that description.

I don’t know who should coach the Eagles in 2024. I do know that it should not be Nick Sirianni.