By Scott Salomon
The Philadelphia Eagles spent 45 minutes on the field in their final preparations during a Saturday walk-through at the Ochsner Sports Performance Center on the day before Super Bowl 59.
Head coach Nick Sirianni described the team as “hungry” and “ready to roll.”
“When you have two weeks off [since the NFC Championship Game],” he said, “it’s like, ‘Let’s go!’”
With players wearing sneakers, sweats or shorts, and practice jerseys – there were no helmets but a few donned baseball caps to protect from the sun on a warm 78-degree late morning – the offense and defense jogged through plays against scout teams at opposite ends of the field.
That was followed by situational football covering various end-of-half/end-of-game scenarios. Sirianni said the team does that every day and typically emphasizes it a little longer on Saturdays. Finally, a few special teams plays were executed before the team quickly hopped back on its fleet of buses and headed to the Caesars Superdome, the home of the New Orleans Saints, for a team photo.
Sirianni hoped to make Saturday close to what the team did the night before every other game this season.
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“Stay off our feet, relax, night meetings, and get ready to go,” he said. “Everyone will go through the routine that they’ve been going through the entire 20-whatever weeks we’ve been doing this now… You don’t get to this point and change up what is important to your team and your core values.”
Those values, he said, are “Tough, Detailed, Together.”
The Eagles went through this process two years ago when they faced Kansas City in Super Bowl 57. Sirianni said there were some tweaks made based on that experience.
“Slightly different stuff with our schedule, things that we thought we could have done better the last time,” he said.
As for the gameplan and vibe of the squad compared to two years ago?
“It’s a different team. We’re a different team,” he stressed. “We’ve just been preparing and we’re up for the challenge.”
It has been a long season for the Eagles that started with a Week 1 game against the Green Bay Packers in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Sirianni laughed when asked if that opener felt like a lifetime ago.
“It feels like a lifetime ago we played Green Bay in the playoffs,” Sirianni joked. “So twice with Green Bay. But we’re excited for the challenge and going through our normal stuff.”
Now that journey is down to its final hours.
“I’ve tried to preach to the guys that everyone else is here for the enjoyment and the experience,” Sirianni said. “We’re here to play a football game. We’re here to make sure that all the work we put in for the last however many weeks – it feels like a long time – is to play our best football at the end of the year. We’re ready for the challenge against a really good team.”
