Friday, October 27, 2017

The Eagles Relied on an Old Recipe to Cook Up some New Success

The Philadelphia Eagles had not won more than seven games for nine-straight seasons including a 5-9 record in 1975. The team’s owner at the time was Leonard Tose and he decided to shake things up by hiring a head coach with no prior NFL experience.

Dick Vermeil came to Philly from the West Coast as the former head coach at UCLA. After winning just four games in his first season at the helm, he decided to shake things up by trading for Ron Jaworski to be his new starting quarterback. The Eagles won five games that season before things came together in Vermeil’s third year on the job with a 9-7 record in 1978 and the team’s first trip to the postseason since it won the old NFL title back in 1960. Vermeil led the Eagles to their first Super Bowl appearance in 1980 before leaving the team before the 1983 season.

Flash forward to 1999 following a 3-13 record the previous season when the team’s current owner Jeffrey Lurie went back to that old formula but with a twist. Instead of dipping into the college ranks, he decided to hire an assistant coach from one of the most successful franchises in the NFL. Andy Reid worked under Mike Holmgren at Green Bay, who earned his first NFL head coaching job with the Packers under the tutelage of Bill Walsh while an assistant coach in San Francisco.

Reid made an immediate impact on the Eagles’ fortunes by using the second pick of the 1999 NFL Draft to land Donavan McNabb after a stellar career as Syracuse’s quarterback in college. Philly went from three wins to five in Reid’s first year, but things turned around dramatically from there. It started with an 11-5 record in 2000 followed by four-straight trips to the NFC title game and one trip to the Super Bowl in 2004. All told, he coached the team from 1999 to 2012 and posted nine trips to the playoffs in those 14 seasons at the helm. Reid and McNabb never could bring home that highly coveted Super Bowl title, but it was one incredible ride over all those years.

After toying with the idea that a college coach could be successful in the NFL, Lurie dug out the origial recipe from 1976 one more time to try and get his team back on top as one of the elite franchises in the NFL. After the Chip Kelly experiment failed miserably, the Eagles went back to a much more reliable recipe to turn things around by tapping Reid’s new coaching staff in Kansas City to hire Doug Pederson as their new head coach. The lineage back to Walsh continued to the next generation in hopes that lightning could strike twice in the City of Brotherly Love.

Pederson’s first move as head coach along with team vice president Howie Roseman was to trade up to the second pick of the 2016 draft to select former North Dakota State standout Carson Wentz as their new franchise quarterback. The first season of Pederson and Wentz as the new coach and quarterback tandem in Philly went pretty much as expected with a record of 7-9. Pederson made some questionable calls at times and Wentz sprinkled in some excellent play while looking like a rookie quarterback in the NFL for much of the year. The big takeaway from last season was that two of the biggest pieces for success in this league appeared to be in place.

While even with this year’s fantastic 6-1 start, it is far too soon to make any direct comparisons to Reid and McNabb’s success over all of the years. That being said, you still cannot help from getting excited over the prospect of what the next decade or so of pro football in Philly might hold.

It has quickly become apparent that Pederson learned what he needed to learn from Reid, who learned from Holmgren after his mentor payed close attention to what Walsh had to say all those years ago. Some of the best recipes around are the ones handed down from generation to generation.

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