Report: Eagles coach to team on 49ers trash talk: ‘Take it personally’

Both the 49ers and Eagles mostly played nice this week ahead of Sunday’s massive NFC showdown. But all of the trash talk that the 49ers sent Philly’s way since the NFC title game loss was not going to be forgotten easily.

According to FOX’s Jay Glazer, Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni wanted to make sure that his team had the trash talk fresh in mind before kickoff on Sunday, playing the clips of the 49ers talking and giving his team clear instructions.

“[Sirianni] didn’t shy away from it. Instead, he told his team, ‘Take it personally,’” Glazer said on FOX’s NFL pregame show on Sunday.

Glazer also reported that not only did Sirianni show the Eagles the clips of the 49ers talking trash, he played clips from the 1990s NBA.

“[Sirianni] also showed clips of players talking trash about Michael Jordan and what Michael Jordan would do to make them pay,” Glazer said. “He said, ‘That’s what I want. I want you to take it personally.’”

It isn’t necessarily a surprise that the Eagles head coach would use the Niners’ trash talk as motivation for his team. But it is another example of Sirianni being rather duplicitous, given he did nothing but praise the 49ers in the week leading up to the big matchup. While filling in on KNBR this week, Bay Area News Group columnist Dieter Kurtenbach expressed that he disliked Sirianni for the two-faced nature of the coach.

“You can’t have it both ways, my man,” Kurtenbach said. “You can’t be Mr. Trash Talker on the field and yelling at Chiefs fans, ‘Take that, Kansas City. Yeah, let’s go.’ You can’t have all of that and then be in a press conference and be like, ‘Yeah, we don’t care.’ And then be in the next press conference and be like, ‘You can’t do it like us.’”

Kurtenbach said Sirianni is “just a jawn,” a Philly-specific term to say he’s an average guy, and that the Eagles are lucky Jalen Hurts is the face of the franchise. In Kurtenbach’s assessment, if the Eagles had a different quarterback who was more willing to engage in public trash talk than Hurts, then Philly would be “the most unprofessional team in football.”

While Sirianni may get on the nerves of some people, there’s no question that he’s been an elite head coach in his three NFL seasons so far. The Eagles are 33-12 under Sirianni and have even kept winning even after losing both coordinators to head coaching jobs after last year’s Super Bowl run.

That run to the Super Bowl was only helped, though, by the 49ers losing both quarterbacks in last year’s NFC title game. Several Niners clearly felt they would have won that game, if not for those injuries. More than 10 months later, we’ll finally get to see if the Niners are justified in their feelings about the Eagles.