The Philadelphia Eagles will be facing the Dallas Cowboys for the first time this season in Week 9, and Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni discussed the upcoming NFC East showdown, saying that his team has to remain focused on the big picture.
“We have to treat every day the same. You can’t get more up for one game than you would the next game. … There’s a lot of football to be played after that,” Sirianni said, via Josh Alper of Pro Football Talk. “We can only play one game at a time. So, I just don’t think of it that way. And I’m not asking for anyone to understand that mindset, and I’m not asking anyone to understand our team’s mindset there. But we have to completely go about our business every single day and just try to go 1-0 today so we can try to go 1-0 this week.”
Of course, Sirianni probably learned that lesson himself during his first season in Philadelphia in 2021, when he wore a “Beat Dallas” shirt during one of his press conferences and then saw his squad get blown out by a score of 41-21 in its first meeting with the Cowboys in September.
Philadelphia is currently 7-1 and holds a one-and-a-half game lead over Dallas—which is 5-2—for the division lead.
Sirianni is now in his third year as head coach of the Eagles and has gone 30-12 thus far, leading Philly all the way to a Super Bowl appearance before ultimately falling to the Kansas City Chiefs last February.
He also added that he has “grown in many ways” since taking the reins as the Birds’ coach, so the good news is that he certainly won’t be wearing any shirts like 2021 anymore.
Sirianni does, however, think that the fans in attendance at Lincoln Financial Field will be extra rowdy when the Cowboys come to town.
“[The game] means a little bit extra to the people in those seats and it’s going to be loud and it’s going to be a hostile environment,” he said.
You can catch the action at 4:25 p.m. ET this Sunday.
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