Eagles hiring of Douglas proves Lurie serious about building strong front office

APPARENTLY, JEFFREY Lurie really does want to do this thing right. That's something we haven't been able to say until now. Not because it wasn't true, but because the signs he's sent since firing Chip Kelly and Ed Marynowitz have been as garbled as the explanations he's offered in defense of them.

Until now.

On the surface, the only way to interpret the Eagles' hiring of Joe Douglas to head up the team's personnel department is that Lurie was serious when he said he wanted to build a legitimate personnel department, and that, this time, he would hold Howie Roseman accountable for the performance of that department. Otherwise, you might've expected Roseman to opt for a guy who wouldn't pose such an immediate threat to his turf, a guy more in the mold of Marynowitz, who was Kelly's guy in every sense of that apostrophe, less a department head than a chief of staff, charged with facilitating and implementing his boss' agenda rather than shaping policy. It's a distinction as significant as it is subtle, the devil less in the details of the job description and more in the implicit spirit of the thing.

There's some dot-connecting here, but not much. As long as we assume that, 1) the Bears still think as highly of Douglas as they did last year at this time, when they hired him away from his 15-year stint in the Ravens' vaunted personnel machine, and 2) that the praise he's received from NFL types in the Twittersphere is not drastically misinformed, then the Eagles almost certainly were offering him the kind of opportunity the Bears could not in good conscience prevent him from pursuing, as was their contractual right. It's a right they'd exercised a few months earlier, when they declined the Browns' request to interview him, presumably because Cleveland's new regime requested the interview before the draft, which is SOP in the NFL amateur scouting world.

That suggests that Lurie was putting his money where his mouth was in a literal sense, offering a salary that signified to Douglas that he wasn't signing on to be a simple yes man and to the Bears that they could not match either the money or the opportunity (otherwise a pay bump and fancier title might've persuaded him to stay). If all of that sounds rather bureaucratic, welcome to the personnel world. It's just the way things work. The other scenario was the activist owner model popularized by the Cowboys and Raiders, with Jeffrey playing the owner and Howie playing the crown prince (Jerry/Stephen, Al/Mark).

Now that the organizational flow chart is complete, it is difficult to read it as anything other than a diffusion of the power that Lurie previously had concentrated in the hands of his head coach. While Douglas answers to Roseman, he would appear to possess enough political capital to affect policy, particularly since head coach Doug Pederson already appears to have siphoned off a portion of the owner's ear. Look at it this way: If Lurie regards Pederson's opinions as reflective of the opinions Andy Reid would have, and he regards Douglas' opinions as reflective of those that Ozzie Newsome would have, then chances are he will give some serious thought to any circumstance in which one or both of those opinions conflicts with the other two. That's a healthy arrangement that, at least on the surface, is more similar to the one that existed with Joe Banner, Tom Modrak and Reid during the early part of that regime, before the Eagles' success on the field enabled Reid to consolidate the power.

While Douglas will hold the same title previously held by Marynowitz, he brings far more political capital to the table. Marynowitz was only 30 years old and was promoted internally from an assistant director position, while Douglas was hired away from his job as Bears director of college scouting, a role he was hired into after 15 years working under Newsome in one of the better-regarded college scouting departments in the game. The fact that the Eagles have named a longtime Douglas ally as assistant director of player personnel (former Ravens scout Andy Weidl, who will occupy the title Marynowitz held before his short-lived promotion to VP) reinforces the notion that Lurie really is implementing a new vision for his personnel department.

The moves, announced Wednesday, lend further credence to the notion that Lurie was the driving force behind the Eagles' brazen trade for the No. 2 pick that landed quarterback Carson Wentz. Whether or not that move pays off, Eagles fans should feel encouraged that the owner appears to have recognized that his franchise's talent evaluation infrastructure was in need of a significant overhaul. Whatever the semantics say, this is a significant departure from the way the Eagles have operated over the last half-decade-plus. More than any single day of this offseason, Wednesday offered legitimate reason to believe Lurie is capable of leading his franchise back to an era of sustained success.

@ByDavidMurphy