District of Columbia
formerly dcmade
- Mar 17, 2013
- 8,312
- 3,977
THE OLD PHILADELPHIA EAGLES THREAD
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by Nike Jordan,
- Start date
- Aug 4, 2005
- 35,033
- 16,945
Not my first choice but still a good hire
- Mar 30, 2007
- 151,258
- 202,695
- Aug 23, 2010
- 12,155
- 7,858
Some photos of dude actually make him look like a younger version of Frank
- Aug 24, 2017
- 11,384
- 30,075
He worked directly with Frank for a year and was able to have old *** noodle arm Rivers playing at a high level. I like the signing. And he's not an old school head coach. He's a young McVay type which I'm not mad at.
Bruce Banner
formerly jetsetkev
- Apr 15, 2013
- 6,341
- 3,187
I’m with it but Duce gotta be feeling some type of way .
- Aug 4, 2005
- 35,033
- 16,945
He’s young but has decent experience. Probably “checks the most boxes” for what they were looking for
- Sep 17, 2008
- 14,677
- 2,213
don't know a thing about this guy, just glad it ain't McDaniels.
Feel bad for Duce but on one hand, I feel like he'd be set up for failure anyway and I'd rather not see him fired because he couldn't do much with the hand he was dealt
Feel bad for Duce but on one hand, I feel like he'd be set up for failure anyway and I'd rather not see him fired because he couldn't do much with the hand he was dealt
- Aug 24, 2017
- 11,384
- 30,075
Duce still in the running for Oc tho right?
- Mar 30, 2007
- 151,258
- 202,695
- Mar 30, 2004
- 12,391
- 4,787
Can anyone share?
District of Columbia
formerly dcmade
- Mar 17, 2013
- 8,312
- 3,977
Looked up Johnathan Taylor’s stats last year .. Miles is going to feast if he’s healthy all year
- Aug 23, 2010
- 12,155
- 7,858
Miles is about to eat
- Aug 23, 2010
- 12,155
- 7,858
For Nick Sirianni, one of the most pivotal moments in his coaching career happened far from a football field and nowhere near a meeting room.
It was, rather, the time he found himself running, in a full business suit, in ankle deep sand on Miami Beach.
How he got there is a story unto itself. But the whole bizarre experience provided an epiphany that, ultimately, has led him to what he’s become today: The Indianapolis Colts’ first-year offensive coordinator.
See, each time Sirianni considered walking away from coaching, the profession pulled him back in.
Maybe that was due to his lifelong immersion in football. Or, in the aforementioned scenario, maybe it was a higher power. Sirianni likes to think his ultimate fate was preordained, and it’s hard to disagree when you consider his brief and calamitous attempts at doing something else for a living.
“It was like God said, ‘You’re a football coach and you’re going to be a football coach,’ ” Sirianni joked.
Which brings us back to the ridiculous sight of Sirianni running on the beach in a suit.
He was there because he knew a guy who knew a guy. A college friend who had found success in a sales job in South Florida convinced Sirianni he’d be a good fit. His friend also sold the boss on the idea. So, during a guy’s getaway trip to Miami Beach, Sirianni’s friend lined up an interview.
It seemed like a great idea for a recent college grad whose income consisted of an $8,000 stipend for his graduate assistant coaching job at Division III Mount Union: Come to paradise, hang out for a few days and, just maybe, embark on a new career.
The meeting was to take place at a nearby restaurant. At the last minute, plans changed and a rendezvous was arranged at the buddy’s apartment. There was just one problem: Sirianni was locked out. His friend had the only available key. And his friend had just taken off for a jog.
On the beach.
“I look outside and he’s waaay down the beach,” Sirianni recalled. “I’m thinking, ‘I don’t think I can catch him.’ But I’m completely locked out. So, I had to chase him, in my suit, in the middle of the summer, in Miami. I literally had to sprint. It felt like a mile. My shoes were dusty, my hair was dusty, I’m pouring sweat. I finally get back, did the interview. I couldn’t stop sweating the whole time. I was breathing heavy. I looked like a total bum.”
As you might imagine, there would be no job offer.
“I knew it wasn’t going to work out,” Sirianni said. “I can laugh about it now though. It worked out the way it was supposed to.”
A similar result came out of Sirianni’s brief attempt at playing professional football. While working at Mount Union, he convinced coach Larry Kehres in 2005 to allow him to moonlight as a wide receiver in something called the Atlantic Indoor Football League (AIFL). Sirianni would suit up for a band of misfits known as the Canton Legends.
Sirianni was an accomplished player at Mount Union. Three-year starter. All-conference selection after a 13-touchdown senior season. Not bad when you consider the Purple Raiders are a perennial Division III power. Taking a stab at professional football didn’t seem like a preposterous idea.
At least at first.
“I remember catching my very first pass,” Sirianni said. “Before the game, I remember looking up the (defender) I was going to be playing against. I’m playing against a guy who played at North Carolina State. I played at Mount Union, man. We were good, but we weren’t in the ACC!
“So, I catch the pass, but I make him miss. And just when I start thinking I’m pretty sweet, this defensive tackle crushes me into the wall. I fumbled. I can’t even remember if we recovered. I’m like, ‘Oh, my goodness. Am I OK?’ I used to, at Mount Union, catch the ball and get out of bounds. I knew what my body could take.”
This proved to be another of those revelatory moments that reinforced Sirianni’s ultimate career path.
“It was never going to be a long-term thing,” Sirianni says now. “There was no future there. I wasn’t going to let it affect my coaching career. I wasn’t getting a rookie-camp tryout from it.”
His next steps became clearer than ever. Sirianni was going to be a coach. And, truth be told, that fate was largely sealed before Sirianni had even finished grade school.
He was always destined to join the family business.
In western New York, Fran Sirianni’s name is synonymous with coaching success. He was inducted earlier this year into the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame after a high school coaching career that spanned 45 years. The sports complex at Southwestern Central High in Jamestown, N.Y., bears his name.
That he would raise three sons who grew up to be accomplished football coaches in their own ways should come as little surprise.
“I’m looking at a sign that’s over our archway that says, ‘Faith, family and football,’ ” Fran Sirianni says in a phone interview. “That’s probably the motto of our family. Our faith is strong but football is definitely strong in that third spot.”
Little else registered in the Sirianni household. Outside of those three elements, there wasn’t room for much else.
Nick Sirianni has the Colts offense and Andrew Luck performing well this season. (Courtesy of Indianapolis Colts)
Fran was the head coach at Southwestern Central when his three boys were young. So, afternoons consisted of a near-daily routine: Their mom, Amy,would pile the boys into the car and take them to practice to hang out with dad.
Nick, being the younger brother to Mike and Jay, sometimes struggled to keep up during the boys’ rambunctious routine.
“I think he was more the tackling dummy, really,” Fran says.
“We would turn all the showers on in the locker room,” Nick said. “We’d all have our swimsuits on and play tackle football and pretend we were in the rain. My brothers were six and nine years older than me. But I remember a lot of stuff like that. When my brothers were playing, I remember taking losses really hard. I take losses pretty hard now. But I would cry my eyes out anytime they lost.
“Football was always just the center of my life.”
Even at times when he possibly wished it wasn’t. Playing for Fran Sirianni was no picnic if you shared his last name. By the time Nick reached high school, Fran had relinquished his head-coaching duties because of a cancer scare. But he was back on the sidelines as an assistant, often to Nick’s chagrin.
“He was that dad that was way harder on us,” Nick said. “You hear about your dad’s the coach and you maybe get special treatment? Heck no. He went unnecessarily far the other way.”
Fran also coached track and field. After practices, he’d frequently make Nick run home.
“That was my cool down,” Nick said. “It wasn’t that far. But you definitely had to run.”
Nick still remembers the time one of his father’s former teammates at Clarion University told the brothers, “Your dad was the meanest son of a ***** to ever play here.” It was a compliment. Mostly.
“It was cool to hear that about your dad,” Nick said. “But we were always scared of him. My friends were even scared of him. They’re scared of him to this day, literally. We’re like 36-years old and they’ll ask, ‘Hey, is your dad gonna be mad because we’re drinking a beer here?’ ”
After surviving Fran’s tough love, Nick followed his brothers to Mount Union. By this time, they were embarking on their own coaching careers. Today, Mike Sirianni is the head coach at Division III Washington & Jefferson (Pa.), where he is the winningest coach in school history. Jay stepped away from coaching in 2015 for family reasons, but he won two state championships in his stint as head coach at Southwestern Central.
While at Mount Union, Nick was already getting the coaching bug, whether he knew it then or not.
“He was a skilled player, but also a player intent on understanding some of the why of what was happening,” Kehres said.
Said Fran: “You could see he was interested in not just what he was doing as a wide receiver, but how it all worked together.”
Slowly, but surely, the inevitable was happening. Nick was becoming a coach.
After that first year on the Mount Union staff, Nick stuck around for a second, free of diversions like potential sales jobs and B-list arena football. He even got a raise – from $8,000 to $10,000.
Then it was on to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he coached receivers for three seasons. Nick then leveraged a mutual friend who introduced him to then-Kansas City Chiefs coach Todd Haley, leading eventually to his first interview with an NFL club.
Nick called Kehres for his input.
“I told him, if your car can’t make it,” Kehres said, “come by and get mine. It was too good an opportunity.”
Nick got the job as an offensive quality control coach, and his career hasn’t stopped its ascension since. He later moved on to the San Diego Chargers, where he met now-Colts coach Frank Reich.
But no matter how high Nick climbs, the brothers’ relationships never change. Football is still very much the family’s common bond. Nick still tracks Mike’s college games online each Saturday, intently following the play-by-play. And when Jay was still coaching, Nick would have his father relay minute-by-minute updates by phone, from the bleachers.
“When my brother, Jay, stopped coaching football, I was selfishly thinking, ‘No! What are you doing?’ ” Nick said. “Every Friday night, I would be on the phone with my dad. He’d say, ‘OK, it’s first and 10. He’s dropping back! Oh! There’s a flag.’ And then I’d hear my dad yell at the ref, ‘That wasn’t a penalty!’ I miss that.”
As much as they root for each other’s respective success, the brothers remain ultracompetitive. Boys will be boys. Coaches will be coaches.
“We start talking football and we’re just busting on each other,” Jay said. “I say, hey, I won a state championship … That’s the highest I could go. I tell (Nick), ‘You gotta win a Super Bowl, man. And Mike, you gotta win a national championship.’ That’s my go-to.”
Sometimes, though, competition gives way to collaboration. When this trio starts talking strategy, the ideas flow freely. Nick took great pride in the fact that Mike, on several occasions last season, successfully used a 2-point conversion play he got from Nick.
“I thought that was really cool to help your big brother out,” Nick said. “He’s helped me many times. They’ve been so good on offense. I know it’s a different level, but football is football.”
Said Jay: “It’s humbling when Nick would ask me a question about football. But football is football. You block, you tackle, you run. It gets more complicated as you go higher, but we really understand each other.”
There’s also a mutual respect for each other’s coaching abilities. Nick, unprompted, talks up Jay’s prowess as a high school coach and proclaimed him the best coach in the family.
“He won a state championship using a pro-style offense two years in a row,” Nick said. “Later, he doesn’t have the same players to run that system, so he changes to the Wing-T and two years later he goes to the state championship game with less players and in a totally different offensive system. He’s a big-time offensive coach.”
Sounds a lot like what some are saying about Nick these days as the Colts’ offense is gaining attention as one of the league’s elite units.
Indianapolis ranks fifth in scoring this season (29.8 points per game) and Andrew Luck has recaptured his status as one of the league’s premier quarterbacks in a system implemented by Reich and Sirianni.
Reich is the offensive play caller, but he goes to great lengths to tell you how much he leans on Sirianni in game planning and overall decision-making. Sirianni’s is no bit role.
There is a level of trust and understanding between he and Reich that promotes utter honesty. If Sirianni has a strong opinion, he’s going to voice it, unvarnished. And because Reich values his input, Reich encourages this.
“We have the kind of relationship where we don’t hold anything back,” Reich said. “It’s not very cordial, let’s just put it that way … We just get after it, give strong opinions and challenge each other’s opinions because all that matters is that we get it right for the players.”
About those players, Sirianni has a way with them. He’s as much a teacher as he is a coach. That’s not new. Kehres saw it back at Mount Union in Sirianni’s formative years as a coach.
“We’re D-III, so not every young guy is as talented as Nick was,” he said. “So, in order to improve their skills, you have to be a good teacher yourself. You have to give them an edge to overcome a lack of speed or something else.”
Colts head coach Frank Reich (left) first met Nick Sirianni while both were working for the San Diego Chargers. (Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
Sirianni is still on that infinite search for ways to give his players an edge. During the offseason, he took to giving his players written tests on the offensive system to assess their understanding of the scheme.
Sirianni doesn’t want a bunch of robots running routes. He seeks football players who have a thorough understanding of the “why” as much as the “what.”
There’s another reason Nick is proving to be a good coach: It’s his passion.
Jay was in Indianapolis for Sunday’s win over the Tennessee Titans. He recalled how exhausted Nick was before Saturday evening’s final meetings. Coaching can be a grind, and Nick’s brothers know that as well as anyone. But there’s nothing more energizing than a rousing, 28-point win.
“I talked to him after the game and he wasn’t so tired anymore,” Jay said. Nick was so refocused that he planned to dive into film of next weekend’s opponent, the Miami Dolphins, that very evening.
He’s described as a grinder who loves the process as much as the result. Like most coaches, Nick is a little nutty.
“I love when we get here and we’re drinking coffee in the morning at 5:30 discussing first and second down,” he said. “You have to love it because it goes all the way to midnight on some nights. If you didn’t love it, it would be a miserable job.”
For all of Nick’s success in the coaching ranks, there’s one area in which he remains inferior to the family’s other coaches: He’s the only one to never ascend to a head-coaching job at any level.
Don’t be so sure it will stay that way for long.
If the Colts’ progression continues, it will not be surprising in the coming years if Nick’s name is mentioned in the coaching rumor mill. He’s a young, offensive-minded coach – a profile that’s en vogue right now – and Reich’s willingness to credit him for much of the offensive success will go a long way.
“You just do your job as best as you can do it, and if it happens, it happens,” Nick said. “I love what I’m doing right now. I try to stay in the moment.”
There’s work to be done – isn’t there always? – so the conversation is now winding down. But, first, Sirianni takes a bit more time to reflect. What a ride it’s been, from Southwestern Central to Lucas Oil Stadium. So many doors have opened along the way, but none of the opportunities he’s gotten over the years had a bigger influence on his career than what happened in the confines of his own home.
“It was a lot of breaks,” Sirianni said. “But you have to get your foot in the door, and that really started with my dad being a football coach, my brothers loving football and me wanting to be like my brothers. That’s how this all started.
“I was literally born into it.”
It was, rather, the time he found himself running, in a full business suit, in ankle deep sand on Miami Beach.
How he got there is a story unto itself. But the whole bizarre experience provided an epiphany that, ultimately, has led him to what he’s become today: The Indianapolis Colts’ first-year offensive coordinator.
See, each time Sirianni considered walking away from coaching, the profession pulled him back in.
Maybe that was due to his lifelong immersion in football. Or, in the aforementioned scenario, maybe it was a higher power. Sirianni likes to think his ultimate fate was preordained, and it’s hard to disagree when you consider his brief and calamitous attempts at doing something else for a living.
“It was like God said, ‘You’re a football coach and you’re going to be a football coach,’ ” Sirianni joked.
Which brings us back to the ridiculous sight of Sirianni running on the beach in a suit.
He was there because he knew a guy who knew a guy. A college friend who had found success in a sales job in South Florida convinced Sirianni he’d be a good fit. His friend also sold the boss on the idea. So, during a guy’s getaway trip to Miami Beach, Sirianni’s friend lined up an interview.
It seemed like a great idea for a recent college grad whose income consisted of an $8,000 stipend for his graduate assistant coaching job at Division III Mount Union: Come to paradise, hang out for a few days and, just maybe, embark on a new career.
The meeting was to take place at a nearby restaurant. At the last minute, plans changed and a rendezvous was arranged at the buddy’s apartment. There was just one problem: Sirianni was locked out. His friend had the only available key. And his friend had just taken off for a jog.
On the beach.
“I look outside and he’s waaay down the beach,” Sirianni recalled. “I’m thinking, ‘I don’t think I can catch him.’ But I’m completely locked out. So, I had to chase him, in my suit, in the middle of the summer, in Miami. I literally had to sprint. It felt like a mile. My shoes were dusty, my hair was dusty, I’m pouring sweat. I finally get back, did the interview. I couldn’t stop sweating the whole time. I was breathing heavy. I looked like a total bum.”
As you might imagine, there would be no job offer.
“I knew it wasn’t going to work out,” Sirianni said. “I can laugh about it now though. It worked out the way it was supposed to.”
A similar result came out of Sirianni’s brief attempt at playing professional football. While working at Mount Union, he convinced coach Larry Kehres in 2005 to allow him to moonlight as a wide receiver in something called the Atlantic Indoor Football League (AIFL). Sirianni would suit up for a band of misfits known as the Canton Legends.
Sirianni was an accomplished player at Mount Union. Three-year starter. All-conference selection after a 13-touchdown senior season. Not bad when you consider the Purple Raiders are a perennial Division III power. Taking a stab at professional football didn’t seem like a preposterous idea.
At least at first.
“I remember catching my very first pass,” Sirianni said. “Before the game, I remember looking up the (defender) I was going to be playing against. I’m playing against a guy who played at North Carolina State. I played at Mount Union, man. We were good, but we weren’t in the ACC!
“So, I catch the pass, but I make him miss. And just when I start thinking I’m pretty sweet, this defensive tackle crushes me into the wall. I fumbled. I can’t even remember if we recovered. I’m like, ‘Oh, my goodness. Am I OK?’ I used to, at Mount Union, catch the ball and get out of bounds. I knew what my body could take.”
This proved to be another of those revelatory moments that reinforced Sirianni’s ultimate career path.
“It was never going to be a long-term thing,” Sirianni says now. “There was no future there. I wasn’t going to let it affect my coaching career. I wasn’t getting a rookie-camp tryout from it.”
His next steps became clearer than ever. Sirianni was going to be a coach. And, truth be told, that fate was largely sealed before Sirianni had even finished grade school.
He was always destined to join the family business.
In western New York, Fran Sirianni’s name is synonymous with coaching success. He was inducted earlier this year into the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame after a high school coaching career that spanned 45 years. The sports complex at Southwestern Central High in Jamestown, N.Y., bears his name.
That he would raise three sons who grew up to be accomplished football coaches in their own ways should come as little surprise.
“I’m looking at a sign that’s over our archway that says, ‘Faith, family and football,’ ” Fran Sirianni says in a phone interview. “That’s probably the motto of our family. Our faith is strong but football is definitely strong in that third spot.”
Little else registered in the Sirianni household. Outside of those three elements, there wasn’t room for much else.
Nick Sirianni has the Colts offense and Andrew Luck performing well this season. (Courtesy of Indianapolis Colts)
Fran was the head coach at Southwestern Central when his three boys were young. So, afternoons consisted of a near-daily routine: Their mom, Amy,would pile the boys into the car and take them to practice to hang out with dad.
Nick, being the younger brother to Mike and Jay, sometimes struggled to keep up during the boys’ rambunctious routine.
“I think he was more the tackling dummy, really,” Fran says.
“We would turn all the showers on in the locker room,” Nick said. “We’d all have our swimsuits on and play tackle football and pretend we were in the rain. My brothers were six and nine years older than me. But I remember a lot of stuff like that. When my brothers were playing, I remember taking losses really hard. I take losses pretty hard now. But I would cry my eyes out anytime they lost.
“Football was always just the center of my life.”
Even at times when he possibly wished it wasn’t. Playing for Fran Sirianni was no picnic if you shared his last name. By the time Nick reached high school, Fran had relinquished his head-coaching duties because of a cancer scare. But he was back on the sidelines as an assistant, often to Nick’s chagrin.
“He was that dad that was way harder on us,” Nick said. “You hear about your dad’s the coach and you maybe get special treatment? Heck no. He went unnecessarily far the other way.”
Fran also coached track and field. After practices, he’d frequently make Nick run home.
“That was my cool down,” Nick said. “It wasn’t that far. But you definitely had to run.”
Nick still remembers the time one of his father’s former teammates at Clarion University told the brothers, “Your dad was the meanest son of a ***** to ever play here.” It was a compliment. Mostly.
“It was cool to hear that about your dad,” Nick said. “But we were always scared of him. My friends were even scared of him. They’re scared of him to this day, literally. We’re like 36-years old and they’ll ask, ‘Hey, is your dad gonna be mad because we’re drinking a beer here?’ ”
After surviving Fran’s tough love, Nick followed his brothers to Mount Union. By this time, they were embarking on their own coaching careers. Today, Mike Sirianni is the head coach at Division III Washington & Jefferson (Pa.), where he is the winningest coach in school history. Jay stepped away from coaching in 2015 for family reasons, but he won two state championships in his stint as head coach at Southwestern Central.
While at Mount Union, Nick was already getting the coaching bug, whether he knew it then or not.
“He was a skilled player, but also a player intent on understanding some of the why of what was happening,” Kehres said.
Said Fran: “You could see he was interested in not just what he was doing as a wide receiver, but how it all worked together.”
Slowly, but surely, the inevitable was happening. Nick was becoming a coach.
After that first year on the Mount Union staff, Nick stuck around for a second, free of diversions like potential sales jobs and B-list arena football. He even got a raise – from $8,000 to $10,000.
Then it was on to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he coached receivers for three seasons. Nick then leveraged a mutual friend who introduced him to then-Kansas City Chiefs coach Todd Haley, leading eventually to his first interview with an NFL club.
Nick called Kehres for his input.
“I told him, if your car can’t make it,” Kehres said, “come by and get mine. It was too good an opportunity.”
Nick got the job as an offensive quality control coach, and his career hasn’t stopped its ascension since. He later moved on to the San Diego Chargers, where he met now-Colts coach Frank Reich.
But no matter how high Nick climbs, the brothers’ relationships never change. Football is still very much the family’s common bond. Nick still tracks Mike’s college games online each Saturday, intently following the play-by-play. And when Jay was still coaching, Nick would have his father relay minute-by-minute updates by phone, from the bleachers.
“When my brother, Jay, stopped coaching football, I was selfishly thinking, ‘No! What are you doing?’ ” Nick said. “Every Friday night, I would be on the phone with my dad. He’d say, ‘OK, it’s first and 10. He’s dropping back! Oh! There’s a flag.’ And then I’d hear my dad yell at the ref, ‘That wasn’t a penalty!’ I miss that.”
As much as they root for each other’s respective success, the brothers remain ultracompetitive. Boys will be boys. Coaches will be coaches.
“We start talking football and we’re just busting on each other,” Jay said. “I say, hey, I won a state championship … That’s the highest I could go. I tell (Nick), ‘You gotta win a Super Bowl, man. And Mike, you gotta win a national championship.’ That’s my go-to.”
Sometimes, though, competition gives way to collaboration. When this trio starts talking strategy, the ideas flow freely. Nick took great pride in the fact that Mike, on several occasions last season, successfully used a 2-point conversion play he got from Nick.
“I thought that was really cool to help your big brother out,” Nick said. “He’s helped me many times. They’ve been so good on offense. I know it’s a different level, but football is football.”
Said Jay: “It’s humbling when Nick would ask me a question about football. But football is football. You block, you tackle, you run. It gets more complicated as you go higher, but we really understand each other.”
There’s also a mutual respect for each other’s coaching abilities. Nick, unprompted, talks up Jay’s prowess as a high school coach and proclaimed him the best coach in the family.
“He won a state championship using a pro-style offense two years in a row,” Nick said. “Later, he doesn’t have the same players to run that system, so he changes to the Wing-T and two years later he goes to the state championship game with less players and in a totally different offensive system. He’s a big-time offensive coach.”
Sounds a lot like what some are saying about Nick these days as the Colts’ offense is gaining attention as one of the league’s elite units.
Indianapolis ranks fifth in scoring this season (29.8 points per game) and Andrew Luck has recaptured his status as one of the league’s premier quarterbacks in a system implemented by Reich and Sirianni.
Reich is the offensive play caller, but he goes to great lengths to tell you how much he leans on Sirianni in game planning and overall decision-making. Sirianni’s is no bit role.
There is a level of trust and understanding between he and Reich that promotes utter honesty. If Sirianni has a strong opinion, he’s going to voice it, unvarnished. And because Reich values his input, Reich encourages this.
“We have the kind of relationship where we don’t hold anything back,” Reich said. “It’s not very cordial, let’s just put it that way … We just get after it, give strong opinions and challenge each other’s opinions because all that matters is that we get it right for the players.”
About those players, Sirianni has a way with them. He’s as much a teacher as he is a coach. That’s not new. Kehres saw it back at Mount Union in Sirianni’s formative years as a coach.
“We’re D-III, so not every young guy is as talented as Nick was,” he said. “So, in order to improve their skills, you have to be a good teacher yourself. You have to give them an edge to overcome a lack of speed or something else.”
Colts head coach Frank Reich (left) first met Nick Sirianni while both were working for the San Diego Chargers. (Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
Sirianni is still on that infinite search for ways to give his players an edge. During the offseason, he took to giving his players written tests on the offensive system to assess their understanding of the scheme.
Sirianni doesn’t want a bunch of robots running routes. He seeks football players who have a thorough understanding of the “why” as much as the “what.”
There’s another reason Nick is proving to be a good coach: It’s his passion.
Jay was in Indianapolis for Sunday’s win over the Tennessee Titans. He recalled how exhausted Nick was before Saturday evening’s final meetings. Coaching can be a grind, and Nick’s brothers know that as well as anyone. But there’s nothing more energizing than a rousing, 28-point win.
“I talked to him after the game and he wasn’t so tired anymore,” Jay said. Nick was so refocused that he planned to dive into film of next weekend’s opponent, the Miami Dolphins, that very evening.
He’s described as a grinder who loves the process as much as the result. Like most coaches, Nick is a little nutty.
“I love when we get here and we’re drinking coffee in the morning at 5:30 discussing first and second down,” he said. “You have to love it because it goes all the way to midnight on some nights. If you didn’t love it, it would be a miserable job.”
For all of Nick’s success in the coaching ranks, there’s one area in which he remains inferior to the family’s other coaches: He’s the only one to never ascend to a head-coaching job at any level.
Don’t be so sure it will stay that way for long.
If the Colts’ progression continues, it will not be surprising in the coming years if Nick’s name is mentioned in the coaching rumor mill. He’s a young, offensive-minded coach – a profile that’s en vogue right now – and Reich’s willingness to credit him for much of the offensive success will go a long way.
“You just do your job as best as you can do it, and if it happens, it happens,” Nick said. “I love what I’m doing right now. I try to stay in the moment.”
There’s work to be done – isn’t there always? – so the conversation is now winding down. But, first, Sirianni takes a bit more time to reflect. What a ride it’s been, from Southwestern Central to Lucas Oil Stadium. So many doors have opened along the way, but none of the opportunities he’s gotten over the years had a bigger influence on his career than what happened in the confines of his own home.
“It was a lot of breaks,” Sirianni said. “But you have to get your foot in the door, and that really started with my dad being a football coach, my brothers loving football and me wanting to be like my brothers. That’s how this all started.
“I was literally born into it.”
- Mar 30, 2007
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- Mar 30, 2007
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Black coaches should be allowed to fail at the same rate as white coaches
- Mar 30, 2007
- 151,258
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I feel bad for duce, in a sense
like I think he’s a great RB coach.. but as an HC, I think he’d be more the CEO type coach which works (see ravens)
but I didn’t think he was right for us right now.. if wentz didn’t have his clear issues, it could make sense.. and jalen got his issues too.. we need someone coming in with new ideas AND someone on the ground coaching up multiple positions
now I would easily have taken duce over josh and go out and get the best coordinators we could get
District of Columbia
formerly dcmade
- Mar 17, 2013
- 8,312
- 3,977
- Mar 30, 2007
- 151,258
- 202,695
- Mar 30, 2007
- 151,258
- 202,695
- Mar 30, 2007
- 151,258
- 202,695
- Mar 30, 2007
- 151,258
- 202,695
- Mar 30, 2007
- 151,258
- 202,695
District of Columbia
formerly dcmade
- Mar 17, 2013
- 8,312
- 3,977
This dude clearly has an agenda
I’ll be the first guy to tell you that the NFL has a diversity problem and that white dudes get way too many chances that aren’t afforded to POCs
but the fact the Eagles are taking all this heat while literally all the other teams hired near unproven dudes as well is crazy
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