Skip to content
Eagles
Link copied to clipboard

Mike Holmgren: Pederson was coaching material as QB

SAN FRANCISCO - Andy Reid has been the closest thing to a mentor for Doug Pederson, but Pederson may not have ever met the former Eagles coach had it not been for Mike Holmgren.

SAN FRANCISCO - Andy Reid has been the closest thing to a mentor for Doug Pederson, but Pederson may not have ever met the former Eagles coach had it not been for Mike Holmgren.

In 1996, Holmgren took a chance on the journeyman quarterback. He signed Pederson, who was named the Eagles' new coach last month, several weeks into the season to be the Packers' third-string quarterback. Pederson never took a snap that season playing behind Brett Favre and Jim McMahon, but he wound up a champion when Green Bay won the Super Bowl.

But Holmgren, looking back now, said he saw the seeds of someone who could eventually be a head coach.

"As the backup quarterback, not the starter, you're learning a lot, you're thinking a lot, you're watching the coach and what he does, and Doug was a very serious student that way," Holmgren said Thursday at the Super Bowl 50 media center. "And he had a great personality and all that stuff fit.

"It then boils down to: Does he want to coach? A lot of players think they want to coach and then they realize they have to eat on paper plates a lot."

Holmgren left the Packers in 1999, but when Pederson returned to Green Bay in 2001 and was once again Favre's backup, the starter would often walk over first to Pederson on the sideline when a drive had ended.

"That made sense because Brett can be off the cuff sometimes and Doug was a little more by the numbers," Holmgren said. "Doug would have that kind of influence and Brett would have that kind respect for him."

Pederson will run a variant of the West Coast offense that Holmgren taught Reid and that Reid in turn passed along to Pederson as both a player and coach. The system Reid and Pederson ran with the Chiefs the last three years bore such a resemblance to Holmgren's offense that he said he still "could call" many of the plays.

"They do a lot of underneath throwing," Holmgren said. Quarterback Alex Smith "threw for a very high percentage. He didn't throw a lot of interceptions. The difference is he runs more because he's a gifted runner. They also had Jamal Charles. When you have a running back like that, it changes everything you want to do."

Holmgren was one of the first from the Bill Walsh tree to become a head coach, but he had as many assistants follow in his path. Jon Gruden, Mike Sherman, Ray Rhodes, Steve Mariucci and Reid all went on to varying levels of success as head coaches. Pederson is a secondary offshoot from that tree.

"I take a little bit of pride in that," Holmgren said. "They earned what they got, but I hope I had a little bit of influence on how they did things."