OK, Vic Fangio and a new offense, but are you reassured?

Howie Roseman and Nick Sirianni finally spoke Wednesday, holding a NovaCare news conference nine days after the Eagles’ season ended with a dispirited, disjointed Wild Card playoff round loss at Tampa.

What did we learn?

Two things of note, one of them pretty much no thanks to Howie and Nick.

During the session, which was supposed to start around 2:30 p.m. but didn’t begin until after 3, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that the Miami Dolphins and defensive coordinator Vic Fangio had mutually agreed to part ways, and that a deal for Fangio to run the Eagles’ defense seemed imminent.

Questioned about this, Roseman and Sirianni did not confirm or deny it, which, in sportsspeak, means they confirmed it. For one thing, Schefter is a league-certified information broker, not some guy like me; Adam doesn’t go out on a limb and say a team is about to do something unless that team has told him it is, in fact, about to do something. For another thing, if somebody says your team is about to do something, in the middle of your news conference, and you are not actually doing that thing, then you don’t talk around it, you say “HECK NO WE AREN’T DOING THAT.”

So, Vic Fangio is on tap to run the defense, which is a bit of a “meh” for me, but before I get too deep into why I feel that way, let’s talk about the other big thing we learned, and also about my main frustration with the 35-minute question-and-answer session.

Asked a series of questions about his plans for the offensive coordinator opening, Sirianni bit-by-bit acknowledged that the Eagles will no longer be running his offense. They are looking for someone to bring in new ideas. They will run that person’s offense, and that person will call plays.

Sirianni said fired offensive coordinator Brian Johnson was a good coach but because things got stale late in the season, “he’s the one leaving at this particular time.” That phrasing got my attention. It’s not hard to imagine a subtext of “they made me throw Brian off the train and now I’m hanging on to the caboose railing by my fingernails, we’ll see how this goes.”

But for now, Sirianni is the coach, even though he was hired as an offensive innovator, not for his CEO chops; three years ago, when Sirianni replaced Doug Pederson, Nick was a 39-year-old guy who’d never been a head coach at any level. Now, he’s a CEO-type who will hand the offense over to someone yet to be named? What will Sirianni do?

He said he will be in charge of “building the culture,” of making sure core principles are maintained. OK then. Is that what Jeffrey Lurie had in mind in 2021? At the time, the owner told the team website that among the things he liked about Sirianni was “how he gameplans, how he attacks defenses, how he maximizes personnel, not just relying on a scheme but how to each week attack exactly who you're playing, what their strengths and weaknesses are in great detail.”

Doesn’t seem like those things will be a big part of Sirianni’s role going forward. Rest assured, this is a topic that will be scrutinized every step of the way in 2024.

Sirianni is being relegated to what seems like at least a slightly lesser role because he did more wrong down the stretch last season than any Eagles coach I’ve seen who did not get fired. Sirianni and Roseman kept talking Wednesday about the “1-6 finish,” which hardly does justice to what happened. You saw it. It was a total collapse. The Eagles tiptoed their way to a 10-1 start on offensive talent and a few opponents’ timely incompetence. By the time the Eagles traveled to Tampa for a playoff shellacking that everyone saw coming, the team was a complete mess.

The reporters at Wednesday’s news conference did a good job in a tough format. Sometimes with news conferences, a team has a couple cordless microphones, and there’s a queue, so that as soon as one question is answered, someone who’d been waiting on deck has a mic and starts another question. The Eagles usually don’t do it that way, and certainly didn’t on Wednesday. The questions go to he or she who yells the loudest. Very hard to ask a nuanced question this way.

So, nobody ever asked Sirianni or Roseman to account for the total collapse of the team. There was a lot of ground to cover, the emphasis tended to be on the future, understandably, but to me, this was a big miss. There will be other opportunities, as hirings are announced, and other offseason occasions present themselves, but I would have loved to have seen this delved into, while it was still fresh.

Anyhow, Vic Fangio. One of the oft-heard laments down the stretch, when Sirianni took the defense away from Sean Desai and gave it to Matt Patricia (which backfired spectacularly) was that the Eagles would have hired Fangio to run their defense, had 2022 defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon not been hired as the Arizona head coach so late in the cycle. Fangio, who had worked with the Eagles as they prepared for the Super Bowl, was already committed to the Dolphins by the time Gannon left.

One of the precepts I adhere to is that you can’t win next season by focusing on what you should have done the previous offseason. Situations change. Fangio would have seemed like a great idea a year ago. Why is he available again this year? Well, the Dolphins finished 22nd in points allowed in 2023.

Fangio’s style of defense has swept the league in recent years. Broad outlines include using two high safeties to guard against long strikes. The defense entices offenses to run against light boxes, tries to force teams to mount long, laborious drives in order to score. The thinking is that an offense will give up a sack or take a bad penalty, or turn the ball over, before it mounts too many 15-play masterpieces.

As careful observers of Desai’s Fangio-related scheme can attest, this doesn’t always work. You tend to give up a LOT of completions underneath. If an opponent is skilled, patient, and disciplined, what happens is, you get scored on plenty, and as an added bonus, your offense sits on the sideline forever. When it finally takes the field, it feels constantly under pressure.

In fact, as Jimmy Kempski pointed out in Philly Voice recently, no Fangio-related defense finished in the top 15 in defensive DVOA this past season. Nothing like chasing a fading trend.

If you want to try to look on the sunny side, one of the things the Eagles’ staff definitely needs is the ol’ “adult in the room.” Fangio, who hails from the Scranton area and follows the Phillies religiously, is 65 and has coached pretty much everywhere, including the USFL Philadelphia Stars, four decades back. He had an unsuccessful stint as Denver’s head coach. Curiously, though, Fangio has managed to coach for the 49ers, Broncos, and Ravens without actually being in any of those places when they won the Super Bowl.

The Eagles’ defense pretty much has to look better than it did down the stretch this past season, because it can’t look worse. Fangio will restore order, at least.

Maybe Howie will get him a linebacker or two and a safety, and somehow uncover some corner speed somewhere. Though Wednesday’s Roseman paean to Nakobe Dean wasn’t terribly encouraging. Ditto his defense of Zach Cunningham.

My feeling is that the offensive coordinator hire is really the biggest shoe to drop this offseason. The success of that move will determine whether the Eagles become top contenders again in 2024.

So, we wait for more news.