Urban Dictionary isn’t really helping me find the origin or even a good definition for “blame pie,” so I’ll do my best to get us through the door with a question: If all the blame for any problematic team, situation, or result were baked into a hypothetical pie, who of the involved parties would get the biggest or the most slices? In Tennessee, coaches Robert Saleh and Brian Daboll and quarterback Cam Ward are probably passing the pie around like a hot potato. For last year’s Raiders, I’m splitting it in half between Pete Carroll’s entire lineage and Chip Kelly. Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert is getting dished healthy slices of blame pie every week, even though coaches Jim Harbaugh and Mike McDaniel should be the ones with heavy plates.
Blame pie is a running theme throughout this week’s Take-O-Meter. We’re cutting up pie for the saddest teams in the league and credit cake for teams like the Las Vegas Raiders and San Francisco 49ers, who are off to exciting 3-0 starts. I also offer my first hypothetical trade and my first two-part take of the year. Let’s get into it.
Remember: The scale goes from 1 to 11, because of course it goes to 11, with 1 being an awful, nonsensical take and 11 being the best of the best. There’s also a minimum heat level the take has to reach to make the Meter, and any take that clears 9.9 is a Peak Take. We’ve had zero (0) through three weeks, and rightfully so. To reach Peak Take, a take must no longer be a take at all, but instead just a reality for the internet’s bots and bozos to eventually catch up to. Because expected points added, the box score, even wins and losses are all just numbers, and the only numbers that truly matter are the ones we make up.
Take II: Drake Maybe sucks?
Maybe Drake Maye does deserve at least some blame for how much the New England Patriots offense has sucked this year. Maye said after losing to the Seahawks (again) in the season opener that “my impatience cost us the game.” He was right. And his impatience cost his team again when the Pats were down 21-3 in the third quarter in Jacksonville last week. Maye forced a bad throw to a blanketed receiver on a curl route on the first play of the drive, gifting the Jags a near pick-six that put the game on ice. Going into October, the offense ranks 31st in EPA per drive, the worst start for a Josh McDaniels offense in his decades as a coach or coordinator, and Maye deserves a healthy cut of the blame pie, according to a lot of the internet. Maye is getting Tua Tagovailoa and Case Keenum box score stats comparison graphics; everyone is aggregating his bad stats against playoff teams last year; and, of course, internet tough guys now have Maye in their sights because he was caught getting emotional in head coach Mike Vrabel’s arms on the sideline against Jacksonville.
The Take-O-Meter score is going up about a point because Maye shouldn’t just run scot-free in this unique Year From Hell–Super Bowl Hangover combo we’re getting with the Pats in 2026, but Maye still doesn’t suck. I’d even go so far as to say that Maye is still the best player or coach the Pats have on offense. Maye is forcing things that aren’t there because he’s impatient … with a lazy, talent-bereft, McDaniels-led (!) offense.
McDaniels, I imagine, built the entire offense around getting A.J. Brown the football—and then Brown suffered a high ankle sprain on his fourth target in five drives in the first game of the year. McDaniels, Maye, Vrabel, and everyone else watching Patriots games can see that the offense without Brown doesn’t have juice. But one injury can’t be an excuse for any team in the NFL, not even one with a McDaniels offense, and not even when you can combine the injury with Maye’s impatience, Rhamondre Stevenson’s fumbles, TreVeyon Henderson’s inconsistency, the offensive line’s regression, and Vrabel’s offseason adventures. Lower-regarded offensive coordinators have made more with less. The Patriots are averaging 0.97 points per drive through three games. Only the 2021 Jets with rookie Zach Wilson at quarterback have been worse in Weeks 1-3 since COVID. The all-you-can-eat excuses appetizer McDaniels might be sampling behind the scenes won’t be enough to cover “Zach Wilson bad” all the way up the food chain. The offense that Maye is supposed to be putting up gaudy stats within has two to three good players (maximum) beyond Maye, a shoddy offensive line, and an arrogant offensive play caller clearly resting on his laurels, at least until Brown comes back. Let’s maybe cut up some more slices of blame pie and even things out in New England before recency bias completely swallows us whole.
The Giants should have traded for Malik Willis over Nine.
Everyone I’ve floated this to has said, in one way or another, no way. When the Giants were first making it known they were going to trade for a QB after Dart went on injured reserve, the names thrown around were backups like the Cardinals’ Gardner Minshew, 49ers’ Mac Jones, and Chiefs’ Justin Fields. The G-Men were never going to make a splashy move, and Malik Willis probably wasn’t available. The Miami Dolphins just signed him to a three-year deal six months ago, and now after trading away star wideout Jaylen Waddle and placing phenom running back De’Von Achane on IR, Willis and the offensive line are the only reasons the Fins will have a chance in any game for the rest of the year. New head coach Jeff Hafley wants to win now to start building up the culture, and Willis is really his only hope. So, yeah, maybe Willis isn’t available because they still want to believe that he shows enough promise in the offense with the worst receiver room in football and Achane on IR that they’d commit to him over drafting a QB in 2027. It reminds me of the sleuth of Bears fans campaigning to stick with Justin Fields over drafting Caleb Williams in 2024. Hilarious. Anyway, if that’s the case, Miami needs to take a page out of owner Stephen Ross’s book and learn to lose football games, because holding on to an asset like Willis just so Hafley can maybe win one to four games in 2026 isn’t just bad process—it’s rowing the boat in the wrong direction and pretending you’re building culture.
I get that Ross got a hard slap on the wrist for offering bonuses to coaches to lose, but that was also stupid. The NBA has a tanking problem, and it’s not because owners are giving out giant checks for losing. NBA teams tank by trading away and/or not playing their good players. NFL teams have done it as recently as last season, when the Raiders and Giants ruled a bunch of players out of Week 17 to have a tank-off. The Raiders lost and got Mendoza; the Giants won and now have JJ McCarthy. If Miami traded away Willis on his team-friendly deal for what should at least be day-two draft capital, they’d be killing two birds with one stone. Moving on from Willis would almost guarantee that the Dolphins are picking in the top four, if not top two, in 2027 when all of these sexy college quarterbacks (Arch Manning, LaNorris Sellers, Dante Moore, Trinidad Chambliss) are expected to declare for the draft, and it gives them more draft picks that they desperately need to fix a bottom-of-the-barrel roster. Miami will have to consider taking one of those QBs anyway if they don’t trade Willis and keep losing for all the reasons they’re 0-3 right now. And then what is Willis worth? Definitely less, because teams will know Miami has a new plan at quarterback, and because Willis’s contract only gets less team-friendly after this season, when it essentially becomes a cheap one-year deal.
Now why the Giants? That’s an easier sell. Jaxson Dart is going to miss the rest of the year and he missed roughly half his games before that with other injuries, Jameis Winston partied too hard this summer, and JJ McCarthy is just a bad quarterback with a good Jim (and now John) Harbaugh relationship. Imagine Willis in the Matt Nagy–Greg Roman smashmouth offense with Cam Skattebo dotting the I-formation behind 300-pound fullback Patrick Ricard. Now imagine it with noodle arm Jameis or Nine. Therein lies my point.
Brock Purdy is a top-six QB.
No one is arguing that San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy is better than Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, or Lamar Jackson. If you are, you’re just spewing slander on the internet for group chat reactions and X numbers. Matt Stafford is coming off an MVP year, so let’s just agree to give him a legacy spot ahead of Purdy (for now). It gets more interesting trying to slot Purdy in after that.
Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert, Dak Prescott, Drake Maye, Caleb Williams, Jordan Love, and (I guess) Jared Goff have all been in consideration for the next tiers after Mahomes, Allen, Jackson, and Stafford, and most of those names aren’t playing at the standard Purdy is playing at right now. Burrow is a Ja’Marr Chase–Tee Higgins merchant behind a genuinely good offensive line. Herbert, Maye, and Love are all trapped in bad offenses. And Goff might be better than Purdy in 7-on-7 drills, but 31-year-old Goff can’t move and every-age Goff melts down under pressure. I’m a longtime Dak defender, so I’d still have him along with the four mentioned up top, over Purdy right now, but it’s close.
The Athletic’s Mike Sando interviews 50 NFL coaches and executives to rank starting quarterbacks before every season, and Purdy ranked 11th on the 2026 list. Mahomes, Allen, Stafford, Burrow, Jackson, Herbert, Prescott, Maye, Goff, and Love all ranked ahead of him (in that order). Purdy should be ahead of at least four of those names, maybe even five or six. San Francisco leads the league in success rate and expected points added per drive; no Kyle Shanahan offense has had better numbers in the first three weeks of any season he’s coached. Purdy is operating Shanahan’s offense better than any signal caller has before, in part because he's benefiting from rare experience in Kyle’s offense. Purdy needs to play only six more games this year to have more career starts (including playoffs) under Shanahan than any other NFL QB. That has to be worth something, maybe even something like consideration for top six at the most important position in sports.
Zac Taylor is a bottom-four coach.
Aaron Glenn is obviously worse. The New York Jets would be 3-0 with offensive coordinator Frank Reich at the helm. Glenn took over defensive play calling in 2026 and his defense still doesn’t have an interception in over 600 days. Glenn is going to reclaim the Lions defensive coordinator job under Dan Campbell in 2027, and he’ll be fine. Similarly, Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles needs to commit to his Steve Spagnuolo era and just become an old-head defensive coordinator for a legitimate offensive play calling head coach. New Titans head coach Robert Saleh will solidify his spot among the bottom three if Tennessee looks as bad as they’ve looked in three games for the next three months. Saleh and offensive coordinator Brian Daboll, another failed New York head coach, are on a fast track to being one-and-done in Tennessee. But the obvious names who are worse than Taylor stop there.
Packers head coach Matt LaFleur is probably a road loss to the Bucs away from giving up on this season, but even he has more playoff wins than Zac Taylor over the last three years. It’s too early to give up on Hafley despite the 0-3 start in Miami, and Washington’s Dan Quinn has been dealt an unlucky hand with three Jayden Daniels elbow injuries in two years, the Laremy Tunsil season-ending injury in August, and an underwhelming group of backs and pass catchers. Nick Sirianni is the NFC’s version of Taylor. If Taylor had Howie Roseman and the teams he’s put together over the years, I bet he'd be as revered as Sirianni is now. But even Sirianni should keep his job over Taylor because he is technically one of the winningest coaches in football and has, uh, won a Super Bowl. Taylor hasn’t won a playoff game since January 2023, and every January game Cincinnati has won has been because of either defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo (whom Taylor scapegoated in 2024) or the Burrow-Chase-Higgins trio that’s breaking the league.
Taylor’s offense isn’t special. It’s just what Burrow wants it to be, which is at least part of the reason why the Bengals with Burrow at quarterback are an astonishing 1-34 in games where they’re trailing with eight minutes left in regulation. Bill Simmons asked me on his pod to deep-dive this stat, and it’s true: Burrow has lost 34 games in his career … and all 34 came when he was trailing with eight minutes left in the fourth quarter. So ice-cold Joe Burrow has virtually never had a fourth-quarter comeback win.
Here’s the kicker, though: Burrow’s offenses have averaged 0.10 EPA per play when trailing by any amount in the fourth quarter, which would rank third among team offenses in that span (2020-26). The Cincinnati defense ranks 17th in EPA per drive allowed in those same situations since 2020 and 24th since Taylor replaced Anarumo with new defensive coordinator Al Golden, who is currently leading a top-heavy Bengals defense fat and happy on turnover luck to start the year.
Add it all up, and “Burrow’s” 1-34 record is a just a veiled indictment of Taylor. Burrow is just hotter and cooler and plays quarterback, so he gets all of the takes. Taylor is an old shrub off the Sean McVay tree that would be helping Ty Simpson with his footwork in L.A. if the Bengals didn’t draft Burrow, Higgins, and Chase in back-to-back drafts.
Klint Kubiak is a top-five coach.
Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan, and Mike Macdonald are all locks for the top four, and Andy Reid has earned a legacy spot, if not a top-five spot outright. NBC Sports writer Pat Daugherty is one of my favorites on the internet, and he ranks all returning head coaches (no new hires) every year. I had those four names locked in before revisiting his work from April, and I’m not surprised that we're in lockstep. Six months later, I’d differ on the placement of Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton at no. 5, followed by Jim Harbaugh, Mike Vrabel, Dan Campbell, Nick Sirianni, Matt LaFleur, and DeMeco Ryans, in that order. Payton isn’t calling plays anymore. The Chargers’ new offensive coordinator, Mike McDaniel, has been such a disaster that Harbaugh may be on the hot seat. Vrabel isn’t the same coach he was when my guy Pat filed his list; the New York Post dropped the Sedona pictures the same day those head coach rankings got published. (Bad beat, Pat.) Campbell is already sweating about having to hire coordinators every season because he doesn’t call plays, same as Sirianni. Ask any Packers fan whether they think LaFleur is a top-10 coach. Ryans is still learning game management in year four in Houston, and he’s gone a clean 0-for-2 on offensive coordinator hires. There are good arguments to rank the next tier of names—which includes Ben Johnson, Liam Coen, Kevin O’Connell, Shane Steichen, and Kellen Moore—ahead of new Las Vegas Raiders head coach Klint Kubiak. At least five of those six, including Kubiak, should be in consideration for the top six coaches in the NFL because they have the most unfair edge in football: They’re high-end offensive play callers doubling as head coaches.
But Kubiak belongs in that tier already because he’s proved now—with three different teams (Saints, Seahawks, and Raiders) and three different quarterbacks (Derek Carr, Sam Darnold, and Kirk Cousins) in three consecutive years—that he can design and call a good offense. Plus, he promoted Raiders defensive line coach Rob Leonard to defensive coordinator, and now Vegas has one of the best defenses in football (statistically). He said that they needed a fullback, a backup for Ashton Jeanty, and a veteran quarterback to mentor Fernando Mendoza. He got all three—former Steeler Connor Heyward, rookie Mike Washington Jr., and Kirko—and it’s working swimmingly. I’ll say it again: The Raiders are 3-0. The RAIDERS have THREE wins and ZERO losses. The Silver and Black, for the first time in decades, look competent in all three phases, and they have the least penalty yards in the league. I’ll take McVay, Shanahan, Macdonald, and Reid over Kubiak every day of the week. Johnson and Coen may have shown more than Kubiak with an extra season under their belt and legitimate superstar talents at quarterback, but Kubiak is doing it with 38-year-old Kirk Cousins, who is only six months younger than the QB3 in Chicago whom Johnson is getting (deserved) praise for coaching to a victory over the Eagles on Monday Night Football. The Raiders don’t have a prime-time game this season, but Kubs (pronounced KOOBS at AGHQ) is doing Case Keenum–level heroics with Cousins every Sunday around 1 p.m. PT.
Chip Kelly should be arrested for his crimes against football.
This is a two-parter, so buckle up. First, yes, the highest-paid offensive coordinator in NFL history and current Northwestern OC Chip Kelly should be in cuffs. Before the Raiders struck gold on Kubiak, the Raiders made then-73-year-old Pete Carroll the oldest coach in NFL history and arranged a marriage between him and Kelly, whom he’d never worked with before. Las Vegas also traded a third-round pick for veteran quarterback Geno Smith, who had experienced a career revival in Seattle with Carroll in 2022, and forced Smith to work with Kelly and Pete’s youngest son, Nathan. Oh, and Pete’s oldest son, Brennan, coached the offensive line.
The result looked a lot like costly nepotism and greed combining for a real shit sandwich—a tale as old as time—with Smith caught in the middle. Kelly called plays he didn’t install in practice and botched formation and motion calls.
Now, Smith is off to the best three-game start of any season in his 13-year career (by EPA per dropback) with the goddamn New York Jets. The J-E-T-S, JETS, JETS, JETS. Smith has completed more than 75 percent of his passes and still hasn’t thrown an interception in 2026. Smith was always going to play better than Kelly’s version of him; Kelly landed on his feet at Northwestern because football at every level runs on cronyism and greed. It's rare for last names you don’t recognize to poke through, and it's even rarer for names you do recognize to get what they deserve, instead of the millions of dollars their friends give them.
OK, now Part 2: If I ever get the chance to go on The Ringer’s Hottest Take, I’d argue that way more people should be arrested and fined. Especially rich turds like whoever cashed the check to make the Road House (2024) remake with Jake Gyllenhaal.
The 0-3 Texans are fine.
Houston started 0-3 last September and went 12-2 the rest of the way to secure the no. 5 seed in the postseason. The Texans are 0-3 again this year, but this losing streak feels worse. Quarterback C.J. Stroud and offensive coordinator Nick Caley are picking up in the same middling spot where they left off last season. Houston ranked 22nd in points per drive in 2025; it ranks 25th in the same stat through three weeks this year. Sure, the Texans have excuses like everyone else. The offensive line still sucks, new free agent running back David Montgomery hasn’t immediately solved the team’s run game and red zone woes like Caley and others had hoped, and the team’s best wideout, Nico Collins, is already missing time with an injury. The problem is that the Texans already relied on almost all of these excuses last year, and Stroud shouldered almost all of the internet blame after a dismal playoff run that wasted the second-best defense in football. It’s Caley’s and head coach DeMeco Ryans’s turn now.
Ryans has made major game management blunders in back-to-back weeks now. His fourth-down decisions against the Bengals cost the Texans big in Week 2, and last Sunday he burned 30-40 seconds of clock with a hesitant first timeout after the Colts got into go-ahead field goal range. That was after Stroud led a nine-play, 54-yard touchdown drive that gave Houston the first lead of the game, and after Ryans’s defense gave up a 20-yard strike to 31-year-old Laquon Treadwell (!) on what became Indy’s game-winning drive.
The good news is that game management can be an easy fix if Ryans just talks to his math people on staff, like, once. Caley’s offense isn’t fixable. The run game is still meh. Play calling in high-leverage areas (short money downs, the red zone, two-minute drills) has been an issue from the jump; Caley’s offense ranks 32nd in touchdown percentage in the red zone and 28th in conversion rate on third and fourth downs with 2 or fewer yards to go since 2025. Ryans gave former offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik one year too many before he replaced him with Caley in 2025, and now he’s giving a different lame duck OC another season too many. Ryans deserves more flak for his OC hires than he does for his defense’s slight regression to start the season or his bad game management decisions, and if he’s going to right the ship after another 0-3 start, he needs to admit his mistakes and adjust ASAP.
The 0-3 Buccaneers are fine.
DeMeco Ryans is a defensive play calling head coach with real experience leading multiple elite units this decade. Todd Bowles, now in his fifth season as the Bucs head coach, calls plays on defense, but his group hasn’t been good since the pandemic. Bowles’s defense has ranked 18th or worse in defensive EPA per drive in each of the past three seasons. Even though the numbers are better now in a small sample size of three losses this season, the film tells a different story. The front seven is a bad mix of old veterans and inexperienced rookies. Most of the unit is just JAGs (with a few fun exceptions like Alex Anzalone, Vita Vea, and YaYa Diaby), and Bowles has them playing tough, rugged football, but not good, winning football. The Bucs rank 31st in pressure rate overall and 31st when rushing just four, and the talent of the cornerback room has bottomed out.
Bowles has nailed two of five OC hires in eight years, but all five present reasons why it’s time for him to go. Dave Canales and Liam Coen were one-and-done because they (rightfully) got head coaching jobs elsewhere. Byron Leftwich, Josh Grizzard, and (probably soon) Zac Robinson won’t call plays in the NFL again. Would the Bucs rather have Canales or Coen at the helm now? Duh. But now it’s too late. Bowles has lost his only edge (defensive play calling), and there’s enough evidence from the past eight years that he’s never been a good head coach. Bowles was lucky that he got to work with Bruce Arians, Tom Brady, and a star-studded roster in the early 2020s. He hasn’t done much since, and the rubber is finally meeting the road. This week’s upset win at home against the Packers with rookie Jalon Daniels starting for injured Baker Mayfield (out with a thumb injury) could help buy Bowles some time. But it’ll be borrowed time until Bowles, Robinson, and the rest of the staff are given the boot by January 2027.
Mini Panic Meter
Bucs: 9.7
Chargers: 9.3
Titans: 9.0
Packers: 8.8
Patriots: 8.6
Eagles: 7.4 (As always. More on Philly later.)
Texans: 6.5
Cowboys: 6.1
Rams: 4.9
Cardinals and Dolphins: N/A (Going as planned.)
The Rams are still the best team in the league.
The market is flip-flopping between the Bills (+650) and the Rams (+700) as the favorites to win the Super Bowl after L.A. was the clear front-runner for almost the entire offseason. What’s changed? Head coach Sean McVay finally admitted that he fucked up the Australia travel plans, then the Rams dog-walked the Giants in Week 2, and then McVay and Co. did well enough to beat the Broncos last week but got robbed by a bad defensive pass interference call. The Rams gained 10-plus yards on 24 percent of their offensive plays against the vaunted Broncos defense, the highest single-game rate against a Denver defense since 2024. And that was in Denver, on a short week, without their best offensive player, Puka Nacua. And star defensive end Myles Garrett still hasn’t played football for the Rams in the States. If the 49ers game were at SoFi and the Broncos game had been called fairly, the Rams could be at 3-0, and the entire internet would be yawning about their status as SB favorites, not panicking over their 1-2 record and frantically parsing their box scores.
The Eagles need to let Howie Roseman clean house.
How wild is it that Philadelphia Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni—with two Super Bowl appearances, one Lombardi, and the fourth-best winning percentage of any 60-plus-game head coach in league history—so obviously needs to be fired? Shane Steichen helped Sirianni to his first Super Bowl before he was hired away to coach the Colts. Brian Johnson, Steichen’s immediate replacement as offensive coordinator who was promoted from within Sirianni’s regime, was a laughingstock for a year. Kellen Moore helped Sirianni win his second Super Bowl appearance before the Saints made Moore a head coach in 2025. Last year, Kevin Patullo ran a version of Sirianni’s offense with A.J. Brown that sucked, and now new OC Sean Mannion is running a different version of the same Sirianni offense without Brown, and it still sucks. Philly ranks 25th or worse in EPA per drive and success rate after games against the Commanders (!), Titans (!!), and Bears (!!!)—three of the league’s bottom-10 defenses.
Sirianni has been lucky to have Roseman’s roster and multiple über-talented coaches under his tutelage, including Steichen, Moore, and longtime defensive mastermind Vic Fangio. But Siranni got the chance to work with Fangio only because Vic didn’t really vibe with Mike McDaniel in Miami. (Huh. And Fangio is a longtime Jim Harbaugh colleague and friend. Interesting.) And Jeff Stoutland, the beloved offensive line coach at the center of their Super Bowl runs, quit coaching altogether last year because of his frustrations with Sirianni’s offense. Stoutland isn’t walking through that door, Fangio is working with the worst front seven the Eagles have had since before COVID, and Mannion will go down like the rest of Sirianni’s bad OC hires if they can’t figure things out fast. But the take isn’t that Sirianni and his staff need to be fired. It’s that everyone but Roseman needs to go, including quarterback Jalen Hurts.
Hurts is on his 10th offensive play caller in 11 years, and his sixth in seven NFL seasons. Some of that is because he’s had brilliant (or at least once brilliant) offensive minds such as Lane Kiffin, Brian Daboll, Lincoln Riley, Steichen, and Moore all get better opportunities after having success with Hurts. The play callers on the other half of that list are viewed negatively because they couldn’t get it done with Hurts. But who exactly should get blamed when Hurts throws a near interception and then an interception to the same linebacker on near-identical coverage drops?
Bears linebacker T.J. Edwards got a little X famous for “listening” to the play call before the interception, but he later admitted that he didn’t really hear anything. He didn’t have to. He had shown blitz while lined up at the line of scrimmage on a third-and-5 earlier in the game, ran back into coverage post-snap to get in front of a short in-breaker, and dropped an easy interception. The play above was on fourth-and-5. Edwards didn’t need to listen to the play call because DC Dennis Allen already knew what was coming. Allen knew Hurts wasn’t going to do his homework post-snap and instead would just throw whatever he thought would be open right at the sticks. Edwards backed out of the blitz look (again) and got both mitts on Hurts’s pass again, only this time Edwards caught it. It’s already generally known that Hurts can’t throw over the middle of the field and can get caught with lazy post-snap processing à la the two Edwards plays. But it should be well known by his 10th play caller in 11 years, and the only ones with any answers for it are flat-out just better head coaches than Sirianni.
Hurts and Sirianni deserve credit for the tush push. You have to respect it. The push execution after the DeVonta Smith screen that got the Eagles to the 1-yard line with only seconds left in the half and no timeouts was absolutely flawless. That stupid, beautiful play helped Philly make two Super Bowls and tuck one. It changed football. But on fourth-and-1-and-a-half trailing 20-7 against the Bears in Week 3, Sirianni only threatened to use the tush push and instead elected to take a delay of game and punt on their own 49-yard line. On Philadelphia’s ensuing possession, still trailing 20-7 at the end of the third quarter, Sirianni opted to go for it on fourth-and-5 only 5 yards farther down the field from where he’d punted only a couple of minutes before. And instead of maybe preparing Hurts for the same kind of coverage on another manageable money down in the same game, Sirianni watched his QB throw the same interception twice and (rightfully) blamed the loss on himself. But Sirianni and Hurts deserve equal cuts of the blame if Eagles fans are already sharpening their axes for scapegoats in 2026.
