Nick Sirianni Told His Kicker to Keep It In Bounds. It Cost the Eagles the Game in London.

Jake Elliott’s 48-yard field goal put the Eagles up 17-16 with eight seconds left in London. Philadelphia lost 19-17. The eight seconds in between are going to follow Nick Sirianni around for a while.

Jacksonville had no timeouts left. A touchback or a kick out of bounds forces the Jaguars to cover something like 60 yards on one snap with the clock stopped. Instead the Eagles put the ball in play, Ameer Abdullah returned it 53 yards to the Philadelphia 39, and Cam Little trotted out and drilled a 57-yarder to win it.

Elliott said afterward that he was “told to kick the ball in bounds.” That removes any question about where the decision came from.

Sirianni Did Not Hide From It

Give him this much: he pointed the blame at himself and nowhere else. “I didn’t make the right decision, and I lost us that game,” Sirianni said. “And that’s what I said to our guys.”

He kept going. “What hurts there is that the guys fought so hard and I don’t make the decision that I should make at the end of the game. I put that fully on me.”

Accountability is the right instinct. It does not change that the Eagles are 2-3, under .500 for the first time since 2021, and losers of three straight. On the NFL Network broadcast, Jason Kelce and Kurt Warner both said the ball needed to go out of bounds. When your former center is calling out the decision live on air, the explanation had better be better than the one Philadelphia has offered, and so far there isn’t one beyond the apology.

Hurts Had a Chance to Back His Coach and Passed

Asked why the offense had not run more clock before Elliott’s kick, Jalen Hurts offered six words: “Ultimately, that’s not my place.”

There is a lot of room inside that sentence. Hurts did not defend the staff and he did not swing at it, which in Philadelphia is its own kind of answer. He has been through this cycle before and he knows precisely how a quarterback’s phrasing gets parsed in that market. He chose the version that commits to nothing.

Hurts was not good either. He finished 21 of 40 for 220 yards with a touchdown to Darius Cooper and no interceptions. The Eagles put up 13 first downs and 232 total yards, and with their third-string running back doing the work they rushed for 22 yards.

An Offense This Bad Cannot Donate Field Position

Philadelphia scored touchdowns on both of its second-quarter possessions and produced almost nothing the rest of the day. That is a team with no margin for a coaching error, which is exactly why this one was fatal.

The Jaguars moved to 4-1 without needing to play especially well. Sirianni has a Super Bowl ring and enough credit in the bank to survive a rough October. The real question is whether an offense averaging under 19 points a game can also absorb mistakes at the margins, and the answer in London was no.