Daily News | You can make a case for the Eagles’ Nick Sirianni as NFL coach of the year. But it’s not a strong one.
My case for Sirianni is simple: No team exceeded the preseason consensus more than they did. There’s a quantifiable way to measure such thing: Just look at each team’s Vegas win total at the start of the season and compare it to their final win total. The Week 1 line for the Eagles was 9.5. They ended up with 14, +4.5 games, or 47.4% more.
None of the three finalists came close to that mark. The Giants’ Brian Daboll was +2 wins over the preseason line of 7. Same goes for the Jaguars’ Doug Pederson. Kyle Shanahan was +3 over the 49ers line of 10 wins. I wasn’t a math major, but 30% is less than 47%. That’s it. That’s the argument. Is it a strong one? Absolutely not. The conclusion is based on a premise that I invented sheerly for the sake of the argument, i.e. that coaching is the reason why teams exceed preseason expectations. It’s possible that the Eagles finished +4.5 wins because Jalen Hurts got that much better. Or because people underestimated him to begin with. Or because the people in Vegas underestimated the rest of the roster that Sirianni had to work with.
If we’re being honest, Daboll and Pederson both exceeded expectations more than the Eagles did. Was it a bigger surprise that the Eagles won 14 games or that the Giants made the playoffs at all? I would argue that the Jaguars were less of a surprise, because I picked them to make the playoffs. That said, the coaching job Pederson did with Trevor Lawrence over the course of the season deserves as many accolades as the job Sirianni has done with Hurts.Lane Johnson will be a warrior again vs.
The one thing we can all agree on is that Sirianni should have gotten the nod over Shanahan. Right? I mean, winning 14 games with an MVP candidate at quarterback is far more impressive than winning 13 games with Trey Lance, Jimmy Garoppolo and Brock Purdy.Again: deep breath, eye roll. If Sirianni beats Shanahan on Sunday, does any of this really matter? Fact is, coach of the year is more often than not a consolation prize. A bad quarterback situation is usually a pre-requisite.
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