After Philadelphia lost to the Atlanta Falcons 22-21 on Monday night, Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts had something to say to his teammates, even though an illness left him with little voice after screaming his way through the game.
But what Hurts managed to say, Philadelphia coach Nick Sirianni said, fit the moment so well that the coach didn’t feel the need to say anything else to the team.
“Jalen is an awesome leader,” Sirianni said during an appearance on WIP-FM in Philadelphia on Wednesday. “I’m sitting there looking through what I was going to say after the game. He spoke from his heart. I thought his message was right on, dead on. Obviously, we’ll always keep in-house things in house, but at the end of the day Jalen talked about the details, the little things that we did that all of us — coaching, playing –that ended up losing us that game. It’s one game that we got to move on from — learn from, move on and just still have that same drive because we got to get up and have that drive to go do the exact same process that we went through last week, because our process was good, and be ready to play a really good football team this upcoming week.
“I just thought he was spot on with what he said. His passion was awesome. When a player is saying everything that you would say, there’s no reason for me to talk afterwards, so we took a knee after that and prayed because we still had a lot to be thankful for. But, man, that was perfect. Like I said, when your leaders are preaching the same message that I am and that I believe in, and we’re all on the same page, that’s huge.
“Quite frankly, I talk a lot. I have a lot of media that the players hear. I got a lot of time up in front of the team that the players hear. And so I loved it, and I know that helped kick us in the butt a little bit to just kind of snap into the reality of it: Hey, it’s one game, and let’s move on and get better from this.”
