Nick Sirianni says bye week helped Eagles prepare for a quick Thursday night turnaround

The Eagles have a quick turnaround for their Thursday night game in Houston this week, but head coach Nick Sirianni took a few minutes on Monday afternoon to talk to reporters about how they’ve prepared on a short week. He also spoke about why no one on the team is focused on the fact that they’re undefeated, and also gave some thoughts on DT Marvin Wilson should he be needed in place of Jordan Davis.

Here’s what the head coach had to say:

On having a short week

Sirianni said that they are in a unique situation so close to their bye week, so despite having just a few days to prepare, they were able to get a lot of planning done during their week off. He also talked about how the team is has an advantage going into a short week because of their process and how they go about preparing.

“The way we walk-through, the way we meet. We talk about these things all the time, of how important it is. That not only does your intensity at practice need to be extremely high and detailed, but it needs to be that way in the walk-through, too.

That’s why we say, you’re full speed to the snap in walk-through, so your mind is working as if you’re playing the entire game; your body is just not.

Then in the meetings, it’s high, high, high detail. And that always starts with the coaches. I always say, we can’t have mistakes on things. We have to know the answers, what we’re going to do against this play versus this look, this play versus this look. All the different looks that we could possibly give them, have an answer for them.”

Last year, Sirianni had to coaches over for dinner and game prep on a short week so they could fit more work in. He said they didn’t feel like they needed to do that again this year, especially being so close to their bye week. They were able to assess the Steelers game on Sunday evening and then spent some time with their families before the long week.

On being undefeated

“The common denominator of great teams is they focus on one day at a time and they don’t think about the past, they don’t think about the future. They think about where we are and how we’re going to go 1-0 this day, and completely focus on that.

That’s the only way you get better. I think our guys are seeing that, that that’s how you get better. The more you kind of have success with that formula the more buy-in there is, more and more and more.

Again, when you have the guys that we have on our team and the leaders that we have on our team, that’s just how they go about business, and that’s contagious as well.”

On practice squad DT Marvin Wilson

Sirianni wouldn’t put a timetable on Jordan Davis’ ankle injury, only to say that he wouldn’t play on Thursday. With Davis out, the head coach was asked about Marvin Wilson. He noted that if Wilson is called upon, they’re very confident in him to come in and make plays.

“I think Marvin, what we saw with him is that he came back in great shape. He came back with his body ready to play. He had a great training camp that we’re like, hopefully — and we’re deep at that room, right? We’re like we can’t keep them all. Hopefully we don’t lose Marvin.

We are fortunate that we have him. If he’s called upon in this game, he’ll be ready to go. We have confidence in him. And again, like I said to you guys, it’s not just like blind faith. We’re seeing him work every single day. We’re evaluating him. We’re evaluating the practice squad players all the time. All the time with the different things that we’re doing with them from the developmental periods to the individual periods to the one-on-one periods, and we have a lot of faith in him if he’s number is called on.”