McCaffery: As playoffs near, Nick Sirianni can learn from veteran Eagles

Rodney McLeod has been around the Eagles for six years, around the NFL for 10, around high-level football since playing at the University of Virginia, around sports for most of his 31 years.

He’s been in a Super Bowl few thought the Eagles would wi, and in a parade days later that plenty never thought would ever happen. He’s seen coaching changes and personnel upheaval, good seasons, great seasons and some seasons that did nothing but disappoint.

There is nothing – and that includes Tom Brady – that he will see in Tampa Sunday that the Eagles’ safety hasn’t already experienced.

“It’s the same field we’ve played on all season,” McLeod was saying Thursday, before practice. “The biggest thing is the detail, how we execute, how we prepare, making sure we let nothing slip by.”

McLeod, a veteran, won’t let anything slip by in the opening round of the playoffs Sunday. Nor will Fletcher Cox or Lane Johnson or Jason Kelce or any of the Eagles who have been through it all.

The question: What about those who haven’t?

Specifically: Is Nick Sirianni ready for what is about to happen, for the change of pace that a postseason game brings, for the way a veteran coach like Bruce Arians will scramble his game plan, for how Brady will unload those skills that have helped him win seven Super Bowls?

That’s not a swipe at Sirianni, his age or the relative inexperience of his assistants. A 9-7 record in games he tried to win answered most of those concerns, setting up a modest Coach of the Year candidacy, solidifying his status as a head coach ideal for what the Eagles will encounter for the next couple of years.

But Eagles history will show that likely Hall of Famer Dick Vermeil forgot to bring a full-time kicker to his first playoff game in Atlanta, then watched kicker-punter-blend Mike Michel flub a PAT and a potential game-winning field goal. He wasn’t ready. And it will show that Buddy Ryan, a brilliant leader and defensive genius, never won a playoff game because he was unable to adapt to the new looks opposing coaches would save for the postseason. And surely it will scream that, in his first Super Bowl, Andy Reid was so baffled by time management that Bill Belichick wondered if the stadium message board was flashing the right score.

There is sufficient reason to believe Sirianni will be ready Sunday. The deal, though, is that he will have to show it in what likely will be the 60 most frantic minutes of his professional life.

“Earlier this week, Jason Kelce came to me and we were discussing the playoffs,” Sirianni said. “He said something I thought was really valuable. He said, ‘The things that lose you games in the regular season also lose you games in the playoffs.’”

That has been Sirianni’s season-long message, and the Eagles’ performance in the second half of the season proved it had been clearly received. Sirianni, his assistants and his players are detail-obsessed. That – along with relatively good health and enough postseason-tested veterans to absorb what is coming – should put the Eagles in reasonable position to prove they belong in the tournament.

“I have conversations with him all the time,” Cox said Thursday. “I always tell him, ‘The calmer I stay, Coach, the calmer they stay.’ Those few words go a long way. The calmer he stays, the calmer we stay. We never allow a moment to get so big for us that we get out of character. You just stay calm and the guys around you stay calm and I think it all works out.”

Early in the season, Sirianni was in a hurry to impress, even using his first home game to break out the Philly Special, although to disastrous results in a loss to the 49ers. But as the season advanced, he settled and grew, and his team did too.

Earlier this week, Sirianni ran another familiar play, again stressing in a meeting how Kobe Bryant used to calmly prepare for playoff games, as he once did in a meeting earlier in the season. It seems a little late in the process to waste time discussing a basketball player when there is a Tom Brady team to confront. Sirianni’s players, though, understood the motive.

“Kobe was someone I admired as a player and a man,” McLeod said. “He just talked about the little things mattering when you get to this point, and that when you get to the playoffs, don’t allow the moment to be bigger than what it is.”

That’s a reasonable approach for the players. But for a coach, the playoffs will be bigger, faster and more complicated than the regular season.

Nick Sirianni has to know that more accomplished Eagles coaches had to learn that the tough way.

Contact Jack McCaffery at jmccaffery@21st-centurymedia.com