October 12, 2026
The Eagles found themselves up, in another game they were trying to cling on to for dear life, with eight seconds left Sunday in London.
An offense, that had stalled out through the second half again, figured out just enough to get down to the fringes of field-goal range with a dwindling clock, which was just enough for Jake Elliott to make a 48-yard kick for a one-point lead, but not enough to completely burn out the remaining time.
So the Eagles still had to kick the ball back to the Jacksonville Jaguars, with those eight seconds left. The call from the sideline was for Elliott to keep it in play for a return that would – hopefully, probably – run out that precious little time.
But the idea royally blew up in their face.
Jacksonville returner Ameer Abdullah caught the final kickoff, found a seam, and broke for a 53-yard return to the Philadelphia 39 before he was tackled and ruled down – with one second left.
The Jaguars hurried their own field goal unit out, and from 57 yards away, Cam Little stole the thunder and the final with a 1-up kick, 19-17.
The Eagles had lost again, for the third straight week, this time in front of an international (though still visibly Philly-heavy) audience within the UK's Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, and for the first time since early into 2021, to drop below .500.
And the holes in the Eagles' entire end-of-game plan were evident right away, and really, could only fall to the feet of one person: Nick Sirianni, and he knew it.
"I didn't make the right decision, and I lost us that game," the head coach said. "That's what I said to our guys, and what hurts there is that the guys fought so hard, and that I don't make the decision that I should make at the end of the game. I cost us that game. I put that fully on me."
So where to begin?
For starters, the Eagles' last possession never killed enough time, though granted, it was probably a break in its own right that Jalen Hurts pushed the offense far enough downfield for a late field goal to begin with, after they stopped being able to do much of anything following Darius Cooper's go-ahead catch and run for a second-quarter touchdown.
But then there was the decision to keep that last kickoff in play. If Elliott booms the ball through the end zone for a touchback, Jacksonville's offense starts at its own 35-yard line. The Jaguars would've needed a quick and very long completion to even have a shot at a last-second field goal, and with the way Jalen Carter had been rushing all day, he was in a great spot not to afford Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence that chance.
Keeping the final kick returnable also came off as a decision highly forgetful of what happened at the start of Sunday, when the Jaguars' Josh Cameron took the initial kickoff back for a 90-yard touchdown, but had it nullified by a series of penalties that included an ejection of Jeremiah Trotter Jr. as a key Eagles special teamer.
There were plenty of other reasons why the Eagles lost that game on Sunday, and why they probably deserved to. Yet there they were anyway with a chance to still steal it.
But Sirianni tossed it out the window, on a not totally unfounded idea that the Jaguars might take too much time running the ball back, though on an ultimately, and woefully, shortsighted one that was dismissive of how the rest of the day had played out.
Hindsight is 20/20, sure. But it was plain to see as the Jaguars took off celebrating while the Eagles began a walk to the tunnels dejected; Sirianni cost them at the end, in a spot where he increasingly can't afford to.
"That's gotta be a question for coach," Elliott deferred while speaking to the media postgame on the logic behind that last kickoff. "I think he's got stipulations on certain amounts of – I don't know exactly what the amount of time is – but it didn't work this time."
"Ultimately, that's not my place," Hurts curtly said from the press conference podium, to whether he and the offense could've done anything different to drain just a couple of extra seconds.
It's those kinds of responses that start to put heat under the seat.
Like everything in the NFL, Sunday's Eagles loss doesn't exist in isolation.
Last week, they melted down at home to the Rams in the fourth quarter, after jumping out to a 10-point lead, only to have the offense totally stall out in the second half to where it couldn't even convert on a single third down, which was all after they got embarrassed the Monday night before in Chicago, against a short-handed Bears team.
During that span, too, injuries piled up, Lane Johnson retired, and Howie Roseman cut his losses on Cam Jurgens and traded him to Baltimore for a 2028 second-round draft pick, which was enough to say that the general manager isn't keeping much stock in this season anymore, because a team doesn't trade a starting offensive lineman in season if it is serious about a run right now – no matter how much the team is struggling.
But that all compounds with a series of similar losses last season, where the offense was heavily ineffective under Sirianni and a lame duck coordinator in Kevin Patullo, where it was never quite clear who was actually designing the scheme and ultimately calling the plays – which was ditto for Brian Johnson for another team-wide floundering in 2023 that, granted, was in between Super Bowl runs.
But those Super Bowl runs were with offensive coordinators in Shane Steichen and Kellen Moore, where it was clear they were running the offense and had a plan, while an all-time defense dominated in 2024 and bailed out a whole lot in 2025.
There was seemingly no plan, or at least not a good one, with Johnson, Patullo, and now Sean Mannion while under Sirianni. And Sirianni, by himself, keeps proving repeatedly that he's a "CEO-style coach" who can't fully compensate for a lack of manpower and skill with his own scheme and awareness.
He used to have the best offensive line in football (and its heralded position coach), a generational running back, two elite receivers, and a quarterback who lives in the clutch to always fall back on, with a ton of luck, too. He only has one of those right now, due to a brutal mix of aging, injuries, trades away, and with it, those fortunate bounces.
Still, in a situation like the end of Sunday in London, a good coach can be trusted to make the right call – to put his team in the right spot, to have the best chance, regardless of talent.
But Sirianni couldn't. He totally misread it, in a situation where the organization has already indicated that it's looking ahead, which likely means reshaping into a team that's going to look way different in a couple of years.
That could for the coach, too, if he keeps costing them like this.
Seat's getting hot.
"At the end of the day, I didn't make the right decision and it cost us the game," Sirianni said. "There's no other way around it, nothing really else to say about that.
"It's just I didn't do my job, or good enough in that situation."
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