Nearly an hour into the much-anticipated start to Eagles training camp, practice was blown dead with a blaring air horn and a screaming coach.
There was plenty of energy in Wednesday’s inaugural session, and a low-intensity walkthrough was scheduled for the following day, but the Eagles were done, exactly 58 minutes after the start of practice.
Relatively shorter practices aren’t new to this season; many of Eagles coach Nick Sirianni’s sessions during his first training camp last year were noticeably shorter than his predecessors’.
The collective bargaining agreement allows NFL teams to hold one two-hour practice and 3.5 total hours of work per day in the first week of training camp and four hours after that. Sirianni has typically kept his workouts to one session closer to 90 minutes long in the interest of player health.
But the four walkthroughs scheduled in the next 16 days is a new wrinkle to the Eagles’ training camp approach.
“We’re just always looking to make our process as good as we possibly can for the players,” Sirianni said before Wednesday’s practice. “For one, for the players to be ready to play, for the players to be healthy to play, and that’s something we go through each time, is what can we do better this year?”
Whether it was correlation or causation remains to be seen, but the Eagles were much healthier last season than they were in prior years. They had fewer players miss time with soft tissue injuries and ranked 12th in adjusted games lost to injury, according to Football Outsiders. By comparison, they ranked in the 30s in the metric two of the previous four seasons.
Sirianni explained each day of camp is labeled green, yellow, or red in conjunction with the training staff depending on the amount of work the team has done the two previous days.
The Eagles did conditioning tests on Tuesday, which was a yellow day, and then followed it with a green practice Wednesday. Thursday’s walkthrough was a red day.
“In our third day, numbers tell us not only on our team, but throughout the league that soft tissue injuries shoot up that day,” Sirianni said. “So that’s the reason for that.”
It’s important to note, as Eagles general manager Howie Roseman did Wednesday, the team will be on the road for joint practices in consecutive weeks later this month, traveling to Cleveland in Week 2 and then Miami for the preseason finale.
But Sirianni said he’s not lightening the Eagles’ workload during the first two weeks of camp in anticipation for the looming travel schedule because of the number of walkthroughs.
“We have a couple more walkthroughs than we had, but there are more green days now, which means there are more high-intensity practices,” Sirianni said. “So, the distances of how much we’re running at the skill positions, how much we are running at every position, is going to be more in this camp than it was last camp.
“I have to listen to our doctors. ... But at the end of the day, I have to make sure the team is ready to play. So it isn’t just blind faith following. It’s educated of how we’re doing these things. And then, like I said, I have to sometimes make hard decisions on what to do and what not to do.”
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Eagles’ veteran players have welcomed the eased workload during the summer.
“I feel like the coaches and the staff work well together,” Eagles edge rusher Brandon Graham said. “Everybody is helping one another and trying to make sure we come out of this thing healthy and try to be the healthiest team in the league. How can we do that? When we gotta go, we go, when we gotta rest, you rest.”
Even on shorter days, there’s typically an efficiency to Sirianni’s practices. He often focuses on team reps, especially for the first and second team.
The roster-bubble guys and developmental players are the ones most impacted by the shorter practices, but many of them stay after for extra work. Sirianni also holds developmental sessions after practices sometimes for young players to make up for the lost reps.
Veteran cornerback Darius Slay also pushed back on the notion that walkthroughs don’t provide value to the players, suggesting they’re just as pertinent as live work.
“Walkthroughs are more important than the joint practices, honestly,” Slay said. “That’s the time I get to really focus and lock in on stuff. I can actually ask questions during the play, we can repeat it if we need it. In the live practices, you can’t repeat plays. I treat it like a game, so you can’t ask questions.”
