PHILADELPHIA – The Eagles were dominating the 49ers everywhere but the scoreboard midway through the second quarter of Sunday’s NFC Championship Game, and the crowd at Lincoln Financial Field – which less than an hour earlier had been roaring at kickoff – was suddenly very quiet and nervous.
The Eagles were facing fourth-and-1 from their own 34 with the score tied at 7. Eagles coach Nick Sirianni could have sent his punt unit out there and no one would have questioned him. But Sirianni sent the offense back out onto the field.
It could have been the moment that sparked the 49ers and doomed the Eagles. And his players knew it.
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“It can do a lot [for an opponent],” Eagles right tackle Lane Johnson. “If you don’t convert, it’s pretty good for them. But if you do, it’s a demoralizer. We’ve been pretty good all year on those.”
So instead, Sirianni used the moment to send a message to his players and everyone else watching when he didn’t call timeout with the play clock running down and let quarterback Jalen Hurts snap the ball.
After the game, Sirianni said three simple words to explain his thought process.
“We have confidence,” the coach said.
His players agreed, although they found a different way to describe that, uh, confidence.
“I don’t know,” Johnson said when asked about the bold decision, starting to laugh. “I guess he has pretty big balls.”
Hurts’ fourth-down conversion in the second quarter sparked the Eagles, who scored the go-ahead touchdown a few minutes later and would never trail again in a 31-7 win over the 49ers that sent the Eagles to the Super Bowl.
It was just one example of how Sirianni, who wasn’t named a finalist for the NFL’s Coach of the Year award, outshined 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan with everything on the line Sunday. And while this particular decision was made so quickly in the moment that it might have seemed thoughtless or rash, Sirianni made it clear that it was merely the result of a process that started long before he sent the offense on the field to pick up that pivotal first down.
“When you go for it on 4th down, you put yourself in those scenarios all week,” Sirianni said. “We have so many meetings about that, of what we’re going to do in these scenarios, calls we might call, what we would call if we’ve already called that and everything like that.
“You put yourself through those calls, but at the end of the day, you make the decision because you trust the people that are out there doing the job. I trust [C] Jason Kelce. I trust [G] Isaac [Seumalo]. I trust [G] Landon [Dickerson]. I trust [QB] Jalen [Hurts] to go do what we did right there in that scenario.”
That trust in the offensive line and the Eagles’ run game has been earned throughout the season and especially in the first two games of the playoffs as the Eagles ran for 269 yards against the 49ers after running for 268 against the Giants.
So how did the Eagles do it against arguably the best defense in the league?
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“We’ve got some big guys on the O-line,” Johnson said. “You’ve [right tackle] seen [Jordan] Mailata. He’s f------ huge. Landon [Dickerson]’s pretty big. I’m not a small guy myself. In practice, you see what we do. We hit bags all the time. We put an emphasis on the run game and getting to the second level and linebackers. Yeah, man. I just feel like the consistency with the backs has been there all year ... shout out to them, they work their tails off.”
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Andy Vasquez may be reached at avasquez@njadvancemedia.com.
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