Murphy: Eagles embarrassing indecision par for the course

EVERYTHING the Eagles said on Wednesday made sense, and everything they did on Thursday flew in the face of it, and while there are several scenarios in which their philosophical U-turn could seem sensible, football operations chief Howie Roseman declined several opportunities during a question-and-answer session with reporters to specify which, if any, had occurred.

Instead, all we really know about the Eagles'decision to cut Josh Huff less than 24 hours after standing by their man is that they once again executed a dramatic reversal in policy on an issue that should have been a matter of principle. By doing so, they allowed a situation that was well within their control to metastasize into the kind of full-blown embarrassment that seems to follow any major decision they make.

The result is that the Eagles once again walk away from a routine personnel matter looking like a franchise that is in desperate need of a singular voice to speak for it, with a new batch of questions about which of their barbershop quartet happened to be sitting in the first chair this time around.

It certainly wasn't the head coach, who on Wednesday morning did an eloquent, if at times anguished, job of presenting what seemed to be the organization's doctrine on how to handle situations like Huff's arrest on marijuana and gun possession charges the previous morning. In the face of a furious barrage of challenges to his spare-the-rod approach to off-the-field discipline, Doug Pederson had held his ground, casting himself as the father in the Prodigal Son parable and Huff as someone more in need of guidance and understanding than punishment.

Throughout his defense of his decision not to suspend Huff, Pederson came across as he usually does: practical, empathetic, and, most importantly, genuine. It would have been really easy for the first-year head coach to decide that Huff wasn't worth the political capital it would require to defend him, or that he was the perfect player to make an example of, significant enough to achieve the desired effect but not so significant that it would radically alter the Eagles' outlook (though it should be noted that Huff's impact on this year's team has been undersold, given kickoff returns of 98 and 53 yards the last two weeks as well as the misdirection looks he enables Pederson to throw at defenses).

Instead, he stuck with what he believed, a belief that all of us would be wise to consider, that a failure in judgment is not the same thing as a failure in character, and while the legal consequences for them might be the same, the difference in their natures demands that a responsible employer carefully consider each before deciding to strip a man of his livelihood and cast him off into a world that knows him only for his ability to play football.

Even if you disagreed with Pederson's philosophy, you could respect its thoughtful logic, and by the time the sun went down on the NovaCare Complex on Wednesday, the incident seemed ready to become another speck in the rearview of a season that never stops.

And then something changed. On a morning when the headlines trumpeted Pederson's unwavering support of Huff, the Eagles released the third-year player. Did they realize the credulity that was required to accept Huff's claim that he did not have the weapon in his car while at the NovaCare Complex that morning? Did they give a little more thought to the fact that such a scenario would not merely have constituted a clear violation of the league's personal-conduct policy, which explicitly prohibits driving a firearm onto club premises, which is also a fireable offense in most places of employment, as well as a glaring human resources and liability concern given the number of folks who work and pass through the parking lot and building each day?

Did they take pause from something Huff said to reporters while explaining himself the previous day? In one of his few direct answers of the day, Roseman said the league office did not "pressure" the team to release Huff, but was there some sort of consultation with the mothership or its security apparatus that altered their perspective of the incident's implications? Did the team discover new information about the arrest, or its context, or Huff himself? All of these could have been reasonable explanations for the sudden reversal, but Roseman carefully avoided pointing to any of them.

"We spent a lot of time over the last 48 hours just making sure that we had the information and that we weren't rushing to judgment, and that we have a process in place for these sort of things that could lead us to what we think is the right decision," he said.

It was a theme he repeated - often verbatim - throughout the news conference. The explanation would have been acceptable had he delivered it one day earlier, before he allowed his coach to speak for the franchise about the matter, before his owner was photographed on the practice field with a fatherly arm wrapped around Huff's waist, before every word and action by the team suggested they were treating this as a case of lesson learned. Doing it a day late makes the head coach look foolish and the owner look wishy-washy while turning a one-day distraction into something far greater. It also makes the Eagles as an organization look like they did when they crowned Chip Kelly before deposing him, or when they signed Sam Bradford before replacing him, or when they put Roseman back in charge before admitting it: like an organization that wakes up every morning with a different idea of what it should be.

When the Patriots release a player, nobody questions whose doctrine they are following. On Thursday, Roseman would say only that the decision was made jointly by himself, Pederson, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, and club president Don Smolenski. The committee has spoken. Who knows what happens if there's ever a tie.

@ByDavidMurphy

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