Bob Ford: Who is accountable for the Eagles?
When Jeffrey Lurie took questions about the firing of Chip Kelly three weeks ago, he was very clear on one point - hiring the guy hadn't worked.
When Jeffrey Lurie took questions about the firing of Chip Kelly three weeks ago, he was very clear on one point - hiring the guy hadn't worked.
It was a bold move, and encompassed a bold vision, but as with those nascent fliers who fashioned their own feathered wings and jumped off the garage, sometimes being bold can be overrated.
That brings us to the impending press conference to introduce Doug Pederson as the new head coach of the Eagles. On a scale of Zero to Bold, Pederson's hire ranks somewhere between Timid and Prudent. It is certainly a defensible decision - although none of the other franchises seeking coaches seem to have considered it - but after going outside the box with Kelly, the Eagles are getting back in the box, pulling the top closed and mailing themselves to 1999.
Fine and dandy, and it might even work. Pederson has experience. He has an excellent background. What he will need more than anything, of course, is football players.
Lurie, as forthcoming as he was about Kelly's failure, was not as clear on exactly how the selection of the roster will be accomplished from now on. He said there would be a collaborative process among Howie Roseman, the executive vice president of football operations; Tom Donohoe, the senior director of player personnel; and the new coach. Lurie sidestepped a question about adding a general manager to that equation, or someone else at the top of the player personnel department to assume the seat vacated by Ed Marynowitz in the purge.
In the pre-Kelly past (and actually for the first two years under Kelly), there was always a murkiness about how the decision-making process operated. It was never possible for fans to determine who really had the final say on a given draft pick, or a certain trade or free-agent signing. If success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, good luck figuring out the parentage of Danny Watkins or, more currently, Marcus Smith.
Lurie knows, because, like Santa, he makes a careful list of who's been bad and who's been good in the draft room. For the most part, however, the organization has embraced that public murkiness. The secrecy only lifted this past season, and only because if Chip failed after making his power play that pushed aside Roseman, the Eagles were going to make damn sure everyone knew it.
"I wanted to make Chip accountable for everything he wanted to have happen," Lurie said. "And one of the ways to make him accountable was to have him make those decisions, because that is what he insisted on decisively doing. So, if you want to make those decisions, be accountable for them, and that's the direction it took. There was a risk involved in allowing Chip to have that kind of say over player transactions. However, you know, risk/reward. Sometimes, the risks don't work, and in this case, it didn't work."
Days before the season began, Lurie said the eight months since Kelly took full control represented "that seamless overlay of player personnel and coaching that we hoped for." Four months later, the setup had failed so abjectly that Kelly was ousted before the regular season had even ended.
So, these outcomes aren't easy to predict and are sometimes painful to admit, but putting clear fingerprints on the steering wheel is still the most honest way to go. Unless Lurie changes course, though, we're heading back into the murky past. Saying there will be a collaborative process sounds fine, but someone still has to have final say. As it looks now, with a troika composed of the resurrected Roseman; Pederson, a freshman head coach; and Donohoe, who will be 69 in March and lives in Pittsburgh; the final say logically belongs to Roseman. Lurie should just be clear about that and move on.
That probably won't happen, however, and the introduction of Pederson, when all the focus will be on the new guy and his hopes and dreams, might not be the setting to pin down the owner on the true organizational structure.
We'll see. If accountability is a big deal one year, it should be the next as well. You can't have it both ways, demanding accountability only from the brash outsider but not from the insider who quietly took his lumps before reemerging without a mark.