Philadelphia Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni made headlines this offseason for using ChatGPT to help keep his messaging fresh heading into Year 6 with the team. According to The Athletic’s Zach Berman, Sirianni logged into the AI chatbot on a Monday in June to search for sports stories about relentless effort. The internet predictably lost its mind, the memes flew, and the story took on a life of its own. But if you actually read the full context, this was a whole lot of nothing.

The full story paints a different picture

Berman himself followed up on his initial tweet, which generated a ton of interaction, clarifying that the ChatGPT anecdote was meant to humanize Sirianni and illustrate how he tries to stay fresh entering another season. This was a middle-of-the-summer story when there’s not a lot going on, and the headline did exactly what it was designed to do. It grabbed people. But the reality is far less dramatic than the reaction suggested.

Sirianni, according to what Berman wrote later in the article, made a point to say the purest form of communication is his own voice. He talked about speaking to the team directly, reflecting on shared experiences, and drawing from what they’ve actually done together. So while he did use ChatGPT, he’s not out here advocating for AI to take over his coaching approach. He couldn’t even get the name of the program right when he first used it. That alone should tell you how embedded this is in his process. It’s not.

The memes were incredible, though

Now, I’m not going to sit here and pretend the internet didn’t cook Sirianni to a crisp. One of the best memes had someone imagining his first ChatGPT search: “What are the most hitch routes that should be called during an NFL game?” The chatbot responded that a team may call five to 15 hitch routes over the course of a game. Obviously a callback to how the Eagles ran hitch routes at a historic rate under the previous offensive coordinator’s scheme. Another one had a drawing of Sirianni standing in front of a whiteboard asking what play he should call next. They were everywhere, and I’m not going to lie, I was crying reading some of them on Twitter.

The bigger picture here

Look, I think it’s okay to use ChatGPT to assist with certain information and brainstorming ideas. Should it be the end-all be-all? Absolutely not. We’ve seen what happens in this city when coaches and executives become over-reliant on outside tools instead of trusting their own eyes and experience. The whole analytics debate applies here, just in a slightly different form. Numbers don’t always tell the full story. You could have a 95% chance to convert a play, but what if a guy breaks his leg on the snap? Analytics didn’t factor that into the equation. That’s an extreme example, but the principle holds.

If Sirianni wants to use ChatGPT to save himself some time, generate a few ideas, and keep things feeling new for a locker room that’s heard his voice for five years now, I’m not mad at that. The key is using it to be more efficient rather than letting it completely take over a task. And based on everything Sirianni said, that’s exactly how he approached it. He used it once for a quick prompt about relentless effort in sports, pulled something from it, and moved on with his own messaging. That’s not a scandal. That’s a guy trying to find one more tool in his toolbox.

The reaction was completely overblown, but that’s just the day and age we live in. Anything involving AI is going to generate clicks and hot takes. Berman wrote a nuanced piece that included the ChatGPT detail as one small part of a larger story about Sirianni’s preparation for 2026, and the internet stripped out the one spicy nugget and ran with it. Par for the course in July when training camp hasn’t started yet and everybody’s starving for Eagles content.

Sirianni is still going to coach this team the way he coaches it. Whether he pulled one motivational story from a chatbot or found it in a book on his nightstand, the result is the same. What matters is whether this offense looks different under Sean Mannion, whether the culture stays strong heading into a bounce-back season, and whether Philadelphia can get back to playing the kind of football we know this roster is capable of. A ChatGPT search in June isn’t changing any of that.