I was in the car on Tuesday night with my family pulling
into a local restaurant for my 21st birthday dinner. My phone
started blowing up. I walked into the
restaurant with my phone battery at 75 percent and walked out with just 25
percent left. The Eagles had fired Chip Kelly. I was shocked. I didn’t think
owner Jeffrey Lurie was actually going to do it even though the 2015 season was
an utter disaster.
There was so much irony in all of this for me. If you know me well, or have just paid
attention to this blog since I started it in August 2013, you should know I’ve
been a Chip Kelly supporter. I wrote this in August 2013 with the first season
of Kelly’s tenure right around the corner. Then I wrote this in August 2015, as the
Eagles were getting ready for the season after Kelly flipped the roster over in
the offseason and took heat for not being able to associate with certain black
players. There were plenty of other blog posts about Kelly, but I think you get
the idea. I liked his unconventional approach and thought he could win the
Eagles their first Super Bowl title. On my birthday in 2013, the Eagles
clinched the NFC East and finished 10-6 in Kelly’s first season after winning
just four games in 2012. Two years later on my birthday, Kelly was fired. That
quickly it was over.
But I’m not blogging now to say this was the wrong move.
There is no one else to blame for the fiasco that was the 2015 Eagles than Chip
Kelly. He jettisoned a lot of talented football players in his three years in
Philadelphia, most leaving in his roster overhaul last spring after he gained
full control of player personnel over former general manager Howie Roseman in
January. It didn’t work. The offseason
now looks a lot like the 2011 splurge in free agency by the Eagles when Vince
Young deemed the Eagles as the “Dream Team” and the Eagles looked like anything
but. That season the Eagles started 4-8,
won four meaningless games to finish 8-8, and Lurie delayed the inevitable
coaching change, only for the Eagles to go 4-12 in Andy Reid’s final season. As
the season went on, it became clear that regardless of how weak the NFC East
was, the Eagles were just a bad football team and Kelly was the one who put the
team together and was also coaching the team.
He did nothing that inspired confidence moving forward so it felt like
the roster flip was a failure that couldn’t be salvaged and had Lurie held on
to Kelly things would have only gotten worse the way things did in Reid’s final
year in 2012.
For most of Tuesday night and early on Wednesday, I was just
trying to let the dust settle from the shock that Lurie actually did it before
thinking about what was next. I listen to a ton of sports talk radio as it is,
so with this news only gave me more of a reason to keep listening. Lurie had a press conference on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the
news broke. The more I tried to read between the lines of what Lurie said, and
the reaction I heard from fans that called into the radio stations, the more
frustrated I was getting. One Eagles fan
texted me that this was “one of the best weeks in Philly sports history” and
plenty of fans echoed similar sentiments on the airwaves that the future was
already pointing up now that Kelly was gone.
What many fans were missing, and what I believe to be true after
listening to Lurie speak is that Roseman is returning to a role of equal or
perhaps even more power compared to when he was the general manager for five
seasons from 2010 to 2014. Lurie said on
Wednesday that Roseman is “responsible for making sure our player personnel
department is as good as it gets in the NFL.” That seems like a guy that’s
going to be making a lot of decisions regarding player transactions and deciding
who comes and goes on the personnel staff. While Roseman may keep the same
title of Executive Vice President of Football Operations, it’s very clear that
he’s the big winner from Kelly’s firing after being exiled one year ago to
allow for Kelly to run the show. I kept thinking to myself, why Roseman was
even kept around to begin with last year when Kelly won the power struggle? Maybe
Lurie just told Roseman to hang tight and if it didn’t work he’d be back. But why not just fire Roseman the minute you
decide to entrust Kelly with all the power and then fire Kelly and start
completely fresh?
 |
| Getty Images Howie Roseman appears to have lost the battle, but won the war against former Eagles head coach Chip Kelly. |
Roseman has been employed by the Eagles since 2000 and
slowly ascended to positions with more power throughout the years. Do people
know that since Roseman was named general manager in January of 2010, the
Eagles are 48-49 and 0-2 in the playoffs as Mark Eckel points out here? Roseman’s
draft history isn’t exactly anything to write home about. In 2010, the Eagles
traded up in the first round to select Brandon Graham. At the time it looked
like a decent pick until you realize that the Eagles passed on a better
defensive end in Jason Pierre-Paul and safety was another position of need and
the Eagles opted not to take Earl Thomas who is now one of the best safeties in
the NFL. Graham and Riley Cooper are the only players still with the team from
the Eagles’ 2010 draft. Jason Kelce is the only player from the 2011 draft
class still on the roster. The first three selections in that draft were Danny
Watkins, Jaquan Jarrett and Curtis Marsh. No additional comment necessary. In
the first round in 2014, the Eagles traded back and reached on Marcus Smith who
many pegged as a third round talent. Smith could not get on the field in either of
his first two seasons and may not even be on the team in 2016. Now there have
been some good picks like Fletcher Cox and Mychal Kendricks in 2012 and Lane
Johnson and Bennie Logan in 2013, but I don’t think anyone would tell you the
Eagles have drafted well recently. To whiff like Roseman did, and be given
another chance, with potentially more power this time doesn’t seem to make a
lot of sense. The one time Roseman tried to make a big splash in free agency
was in 2011, and as I mentioned earlier, we all know how that turned out.
One of the reasons Lurie cited for Kelly’s release was
“downward trajectory” he felt the team was on. As Geoff Mosher points out in this column, when you haven’t won a playoff game since 2008, and haven’t won a
home playoff game since 2006, for a franchise that almost always has super bowl
or bust expectations, isn’t that almost a decade of a downward trajectory?
Don’t forget that in 2008 the Eagles went 9-6-1 and got into the playoffs on a
miracle on the final day of the regular season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
losing at home to the lowly Oakland Raiders and the Chicago Bears falling to
the inferior Houston Texans which set up a playoff play-in game against Dallas
which the Eagles won 44-6.
So it’s very easy to argue that the downward trajectory of
the organization started long before Kelly was even hired. Now, one of the people primarily responsible
for the franchise’s mediocrity is back with a major role in constructing the
roster. Lurie, Roseman and team president Don Smolenski are going to head the
team’s coaching search. Those are the same three people that decided on Kelly
three years ago. Lurie’s firing of Kelly was essentially admitting what he
thought was a mistake, so as the owner why not choose to be surrounded with
some different football people this time around?
Another winner from Kelly’s firing was Tom Donahoe. In 2012,
the Eagles brought in Donahoe as a senior advisor and Lurie announced Wednesday
that Donahoe would be elevated to Senior Director of Player Personnel after
Kelly’s hand-picked personnel guy Ed Marynowitz was also fired. Lurie described Donahoe’s role as running the
“day-to-day player personnel department” and called his promotion a “crucial
hire”. So what kind of track record does Donahoe have? He was the general manager
in Pittsburgh with the Steelers from 1991 to 1999. The Steelers made the
playoffs in five of those nine seasons and appeared in the Super Bowl in 1995.
But in 1998 and 1999, the Steelers were a combined 13-19 and eventually Donahoe
was fired after losing a power struggle to Bill Cowher. Cowher went on to win a
Super Bowl in 2005. Donahoe was then hired to be the Bills general manager in
2001. In five seasons in Buffalo, Donahoe’s teams went 31-49 and missed the
playoffs in all five years before he was fired in 2005. Donahoe was out of the
game until 2012 when the Eagles hired him.
It looks like Jeffrey Lurie has surrounded himself with a
personnel department ran by two men that have each lost power struggles and
more importantly just aren’t particularly good at assembling a football team
that can win a championship. But it’s the particular loyalty towards Roseman
from Lurie that is mind boggling given Roseman’s resume doesn’t inspire a ton
of confidence. Keep in mind that Lurie’s
loyalty to Roseman probably won’t be all that attractive to head coaching
candidates the Eagles interview. NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport believes Roseman is
back in the driver’s seat.
There’s really no reason to think otherwise at this
point. Lurie’s firing of Kelly was a
bold move. There is no doubt about it. But he should have cleaned house
entirely rather than going back to Roseman and promoting Donahoe. He should
have learned from a team just 90 miles north. The New York Jets went 4-12 last
season. Owner Woody Johnson opted to start over and fired head coach Rex Ryan
and general manager John Idzik. But he did so with the assistance of Charlie
Casserly in finding replacements. Casserly was once the GM of the Redskins and
later on the GM of the Texans and Johnson implored his help as Casserly has
been in broadcasting for the better part of the last 10 years. New GM Mike
Maccagnan fired the two most experienced members of the Jets’ college scouting
department who worked under Idzik. The
Jets then hired Arizona Cardinals defensive coordinator Todd Bowles as their
head coach. Maccagnan filled lots of holes in the offseason by trading for quarterback
Ryan Fitzpatrick, making another trade for wide receiver Brandon Marshall,
signing safety Marcus Gilchrist, and bringing back cornerbacks Darrelle Revis
and Antonio Cromartie to the Jets after both played elsewhere in 2014. One year
later the Jets are 10-5 with a win-and-in game on the horizon on Sunday in
Buffalo against…Rex Ryan. Revis said this week Maccagnan should be the NFL Executive of the Year. One of the
candidates for Coach of the Year, Arizona’s Bruce Arians, endorsed Bowles for the award this week as the Jets have rediscovered their defensive identity.
 |
| Robert Deutsch/USA Today Jeffrey Lurie needed to bring in some new football minds into the Eagles organization. |
The chain of command for a football team needs to flow
effervescently from the owner to the general manager to the head coach and all
the way down to the players. Everyone needs to be on the same page in order to
achieve success and when it’s time for change, the owner must know who to
remove and who to hire and must be surrounded by good football minds in the
process. It sounds simple, but it’s been an ongoing problem for the Eagles’ brass
that started long before Chip Kelly was hired.
The biggest reason I believed in Chip Kelly was because of all the
change I thought he could bring to the organization. He certainly made a lot of
changes and I was proven wrong as not many of his changes were for the better
and so Kelly’s firing was certainly warranted. Jeffrey Lurie deserves credit
for having the guts to pull the plug. But shame on him for not pulling more
plugs. So was this really one of the best weeks in Philly sports history? Not
even close.
No comments:
Post a Comment