The Eagles Have Become the NFL’s Incubator for Head Coaches

Almost one-third of all coaches in the league have come through Philadelphia at one point, and owner Jeffrey Lurie says it’s not by chance—there’s something special about the way he hires.

A few years back, during the height of the Aaron Rodgers/Mike McCarthy era, it was standard operating procedure for a search firm in the coaching world to almost impulsively recommend an assistant from the Green Bay staff.

Out came the likes of Joe Philbin and Ben McAdoo and for a while, we took a break from finding the next Patriots assistant coach to try to shove into a head coaching chair and became obsessed with another organizational philosophy.

After that it was the Sean McVay crew, the Kyle Shanahan crew. The Andy Reid crew (except for Eric Bieniemy) was also a trend for a time, and an easy area for an unsure owner to feel around in if they were uncertain about what they wanted in a new head coach.

The last part—Reid, in particular—is what we want to talk about. Because, apparently, while all these smaller trends were bubbling up and fizzling out, we missed one of the biggest stories in the evolution of NFL head coaching. Reid is part of something much larger.

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As of this moment, almost one-third of all NFL coaches—Sean McDermott, Frank Reich, Todd Bowles, Jonathan Gannon, Shane Steichen, Ron Rivera, Reid, John Harbaugh and Doug Pederson—have come through Philadelphia at one point. All of these coaches were subject to the notorious and secretive hiring process of owner Jeffrey Lurie. If that doesn’t feel important to you now, it should.

Lurie is just one of four owners in NFL history to reach the Super Bowl with three different coaches. He’s also the only NFL owner that I know to have come out and said there’s something proprietary about the way he hires NFL head coaches that he doesn’t want people to know about. He’s also hired a great deal of NFL head coaches from relative obscurity, with his only “miss” being Chip Kelly, who won 10 games two years in a row before being fired midway through his third season. Reid was an uncelebrated offensive line coach. Nick Sirianni was not Nick Sirianni.

This week, both of Nick Sirianni’s coordinators got head coaching gigs, which expanded the Eagles’ head coaching map to End-of-Risk territory. Despite word not getting out about what makes a Lurie head coach desirable, the rest of the league has organically gravitated toward his selections to the point where we can say something fairly definitive: There may not be a single owner in the NFL who has impacted the head coaching business as much as Lurie over the past three decades or more.

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Outside of Pederson and Reid, who have won Super Bowls recently, Harbaugh (longtime Eagles special teams coordinator) has a ring, Rivera (Eagles linebackers coach under Reid) has been to the Super Bowl as a head coach and McDermott (longtime Eagles defensive assistant) is perennially competitive with the Bills. It makes sense that both the Cardinals and the Colts waited out the Super Bowl this year to poach their next head coach from the Eagles’ staff, despite many teams preferring to wrap up that process earlier.

During the run-up to the Super Bowl, I asked Lurie about whom he looked up to to try to get a sense of where his coach-identification ability came from. He mentioned Red Auerbach of the Boston Celtics. He told my colleague, Greg Bishop, that the first person he visited after buying the team was Bill Walsh, another notorious football contrarian.

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I also asked Jason Kelce, Lurie’s longtime center, how it works from a player’s perspective. Here’s what he said:

“For the most part, I think the organization knows the direction they want to go in. But I think they’re very smart at communicating with players and the team, so it at least feels like everyone is in it together. You probably don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of valuing players so much that they’re picking the next head coach. You as an owner, those guys need to make those decisions, but it’s good along the way to value your employees’ mindset.

“That’s huge in getting buy-in with whatever direction they choose. Whoever they hire, whoever they sign, whoever they trade for, if it happens without any communication it may be met with some friction based on different circumstances. But if there’s been some communication, you at least feel like a part of it.”

At some point, there will either be a data breach at the NovaCare complex that reveals the actual mechanics behind this, or the entirety of the league will just be Eagles coaches by then. Either way, it feels safer than just overpaying whoever just got finished working with Bill Belichick or McCarthy, back before we realized there might be a better option out there.