Eagles coach Nick Sirianni didn’t have to refuse to answer questions about receiver A.J. Brown on Friday.
Sirianni didn’t get any.
On Wednesday, Sirianni said he’s “close to being done” with questions about Brown, a day after Brown said some things about his lingering frustrations on a Twitch stream. After Sirianni spoke on Wednesday, Brown provided a thoughtful, eight-minute critique of the Philadelphia offense, his lack of targets, and his belief that the attack needs to improve despite the team’s 7-2 record.
It wasn’t just a fair topic for questions of the head coach. It was an obvious one. It was a necessary one.
But here’s a basic reality of press conferences. Given Sirianni’s warning from Wednesday, the assembled reporters would have been inclined to wait for someone else to ask the question. Really, why risk being the person who pisses off the coach when someone else may end up doing it?
Still, someone should have asked the question. Brown said far too much for the topic for the topic to be ignored in the next press conference from the head coach. The fact that Sirianni flashed frustration at being asked about Brown’s Twitch-stream remarks shouldn’t have kept Sirianni from being asked about Brown’s comments or their implications.
The biggest implication (as recognized on Friday’s PFT Live by Michael Holley) is this: A portion of Brown’s comments from Wednesday directly rebutted the response from quarterback Jalen Hurts immediately following Monday night’s 10-7 win over the Packers, when Hurts was asked specifically about individual players possibly being discouraged by a sputtering offense.
“Just gotta play the next play, and take it a play at a time,” Hurts said after the game. “It’s an offense, it’s a unit, it’s a team. It flows as one. And so, you know, there are times where things may not go a desired way. Ultimately, it’s about how you respond to those things. And when you look at a win like today, that’s what it comes down to. . . . The bottom line is to go out there and try and find a way to win games.”
Said Brown on Wednesday: "[I]t’s about doing what we’re supposed to be doing on offense. And if we are really in this business for trying to get better, we gotta do what we gotta do. And not just say, ‘Oh, it’s about wins, like, as long as we got the win, it’s cool.’ No, that ain’t — you cannot do that, not in this league. We gotta continue to get better.”
Even without asking a question about Brown, Sirianni could have been asked something more subtle. For example, “Does winning games justify performances by the offense that aren’t as effective as you hope them to be?”
Here’s the core question that remains unanswered, by anyone and by everyone: Why isn’t A.J. Brown getting more targets?
That basic question has various tributaries. Is Brown being double-covered too often? Is he not the primary receiver on a healthy number of plays? Why aren’t plays being designed and called and executed to get the ball in his hands? When Brown is single-covered, why isn’t the ball being thrown to him more often?
Lurking at the bottom of all of this is the one thing the Eagles continue to manage to bury. What’s going on with Hurts and Brown? Last season, recently-unretired defensive end Brandon Graham went there, saying that Hurts and Brown used to be friends but “things have changed.” (Graham quickly tried to perform a cleanup on Aisle 55, but he still said what he said.)
That’s the unanswered question. The slowly rotting cheesesteak in the room. The thing that we’ll inevitably get the answer to at some point in the future.
Maybe after Brown and Hurts are no longer teammates. Maybe when the book-reading Brown writes a book of his own about his years in Philadelphia.