Before he received an extension last month, Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell had a contract that ran through 2025. Eagles coach Nick Sirianni’s contract currently runs through 2025 — and he has yet to get an extension.
He’ll be offered one. There’s no doubt about it. Earlier this week, owner Jeffrey Lurie said this about Sirianni’s deal, via Zach Berman of PHLY: “His future is going to be great. We never talk about contracts publicly in 30 years, so I’m not going to start now, but he’s great.”
It’s one thing to be great. It’s another thing to come to a mutual agreement as to the price of his greatness.
Adam Schefter of ESPN.com suggests that a win in Super Bowl LIX “would be worth millions” to Sirianni. This assumes that Lurie will allocate even more money to whatever he currently is willing to offer. Without knowing what Lurie already plans to put on the table, it’s impossible to know whether this assumption is warranted. Win or lose, Lurie might have a bottom-line number in mind for Lurie — and Lurie might shrug at an expectation for a significant bump if the Eagles do what they failed to do in Super Bowl LVII.
Sirianni doesn’t get as much credit as he could for a 14-3 season that secured the No. 2 seed in the NFC. In the coach of the year voting, Sirianni finished tied for 11th place, garnering only three fifth-place votes from the 50 AP voters.
For the Vikings, the urgency to get O’Connell’s contract done came from a concern that O’Connell would finish his contract next year and become a free agent. With no salary cap and no franchise tag (but with a strong whiff of collusion when it comes to coaching contracts), the Vikings would have risked having O’Connell finish his deal and walk away without compensation after one more year.
For the Eagles, is there similar urgency? Jay Glazer’s Week 18 Sunday Splash! report regarding teams being interested in trading for a current coach was about O’Connell, not Sirianni. If other teams regard the Eagles’ recent success as the product of an All-Star lineup of talent compiled by G.M. Howie Roseman and not Sirianni’s game plans or in-game decision-making, would there be a land rush of franchises throwing blank checks at him like beads on Bourbon Street?
If Sirianni would choose to walk away from the best roster in football after 2025, coaching candidates would line up out the door for the chance to take his place. Sirianni could end up with a lesser team, and a different coach could end up with his team.
So even though Schefter’s article seems to suggest that, if the Eagles win, Lurie had better pay up or risk losing Sirianni after next season, it seems that the Eagles are far less concerned about that outcome than the Vikings were about seeing O’Connell possibly exit for a new team.
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