Sielski: Lurie and Bradford are on the clock

In the wake of firing Chip Kelly, Jeffrey Lurie had made a pledge to the Eagles players that he claimed would accomplish two things: It would help him find the right man to be their new head coach, and it would reaffirm just how progressive and cutting-edge the Eagles' organization really was.

No more would the players have to deal with Kelly's cold-shoulder style of coaching, with his inability or unwillingness to attune himself to the sensitivities and motivations of the modern professional athlete.

Lurie fired Kelly five days before the season ended, then apparently spent that stretch probing the players' minds and hearts for what they wanted, what they believed the Eagles needed to be more than just another mediocre team. Lurie had asked for that openness and honesty, and after the Eagles' Jan. 2 victory over the New York Giants, from one end of the MetLife Stadium visiting locker room to the other, the players were giving it to him with every question they were asked about Sam Bradford and his future in Philadelphia.

"Obviously, he's a free agent this year, and we lost a really good free agent last year in Jeremy Maclin," center Jason Kelce said that day. "We'll see what happens this year, but if we can retain Sam Bradford, that is the most important position on the field - on offense, defense, special teams, anything. If we can retain a guy like that, that would be huge for our ball club, regardless of who the head coach is."

As of Tuesday, the Eagles have two weeks to decide whether to franchise-tag Bradford. With recent history as a guide, their options - should they let Bradford walk away - don't fit within the parameters that Lurie established for the franchise's new direction. Lurie had framed Kelly's firing not as a necessary housecleaning move for the Eagles to start a fresh rebuilding project but as the key to unlocking the full potential of a team that should have won more than seven games in 2015.

"I don't see any players on the roster that one would say are only a fit for a Chip Kelly team, not at all," Lurie said. "So we have to increase the talent level and increase the performance level of those we have." The Eagles, Lurie seemed to be saying, didn't need up-tempo offense and power-packed smoothies. They needed to enjoy coming to work every day - in addition to better guards and linebackers - and hiring a coach who could get in touch with the locker room, such as Doug Pederson, apparently, was essential.

Well, if Lurie is to be taken at his word, then saying goodbye to Bradford and targeting a quarterback with the team's first pick in this year's draft, the 13th overall selection, doesn't make much sense. Again, finding a "franchise quarterback," however a team chooses to define the term, is not a zero-sum game. There is nothing that does or should preclude the Eagles from franchising and/or re-signing Bradford and drafting a quarterback this year. They have enough other needs, particularly along the offensive line, that it wouldn't necessarily be prudent for them to select a quarterback with that No. 13 pick. But they could draft one, or more than one, in the later rounds - a safer play than trying to replace Bradford with whomever they might take in the first round, given the unpredictability of the position.

But beyond the unfriendly odds that the Eagles might somehow draft a quarterback who would immediately be better than Bradford, the perspective of Bradford's teammates is worth considering here, too. He earned their respect through his recovery from injury and his improvement over the season. "We saw the way he approached the game, the way he dedicated himself," tight end Zach Ertz said, "and I think that gave us a ton of confidence in him."

If the primary rationale for Lurie's decision to fire Kelly was that a team ready to win now wasn't winning now, how will the players react to Bradford's usurpation, to the prospect of waiting a year or more for a neophyte quarterback to develop, and to their understanding that the new kid in town might not develop at all?

Compare those circumstances, for instance, to those in the spring of 1999, when the Eagles last drafted a franchise quarterback. Already armed with the No. 2 overall pick and an excellent defense, they had gone 3-13 the previous season, and the quarterback situation had been as tidy and reassuring as a bus crash: Bobby Hoying, Rodney Peete, Koy Detmer. It was all but impossible for the Eagles to regress from that trio, and Donovan McNabb's arrival did more than infuse the position with more talent. It buoyed the likes of Brian Dawkins, Jeremiah Trotter, Hugh Douglas, and Troy Vincent to believe that better days really were ahead, that they finally had a quarterback they could trust.

That same promise was implicit in Lurie's pledge to these Eagles players, except in their minds, that quarterback is already here. Two weeks to go until the Eagles have to show everyone what they really think of Sam Bradford, until Jeffrey Lurie has to show if he really was listening to the men in that locker room, and the clock starts now.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski