The longest the Philadelphia Eagles can practice is two-and-a-half hours (per the new CBA). Philadelphia barely surpasses 75 minutes most of the time.
Nick Sirianni has run short practices through a week of training camp. The Eagles get a lot accomplished in that short time, but the days of long practices in the scorching summer heat are history. Why do the Eagles have short practices under Sirianni?
“Player health is the first thing,” Sirianni said to Eagles reporters prior to Thursday’s training camp practice. “The confidence is that just because they are not practicing for the amount of time, right, the three hours or whatever, two-and-a-half hours with the walk-throughs, we are full speed mentally in walk-throughs, OK, like we are still walking through, but it’s full speed to the snap. We are still meaning full speed, right. We are still connecting full speed when we are in there.
“So it’s all these things like it’s just not — practice is one piece of the puzzle and it’s a big piece and there’s all these other pieces of the puzzle to get ourselves ready and we are doing those, you know, just like we would any other year.”
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The injury report the last three years plays a significant role in all this. Per Football Outsiders, the Eagles were the second-most injured team in the league in 2020 — with players losing 126.1 games due to injury. The Eagles were the 12th-most injured team in 2019 (84.4) and the most injured team in 2018 (117.0).
With a 17-game season in play, veteran players getting a rest every three days and having short practices (that are constantly moving) is the strategy Sirianni created. The results won’t show until the games start.
Don’t let the length of the practices fool you. They are fast-paced and efficient, just like Sirianni wants.
“It’s just about being highly organized and everybody communicating,” Sirianni said. “It’s how do we make sure we go from period to period. You talk at length of what practice is going to look like. ‘Hey, we are going period one to period two, period three, here is where these guys are on the field, here is where they are on the field, here is where we go ones versus ones, here is where that field they are going to be on, this field.’
“It’s just organization, communication, to make sure that when we are out here for an hour and 15, our practices are an hour 15, hour 30, hour 45, whether that can go north or south of that any day just based off the day. But when you’re out here that you’re highly organized and you’re not taking any time in between periods.”
