Eagles' Jeffrey Lurie: Howie Roseman is the man

BOCA RATON, Fla.

- Jeffrey Lurie pretty much acknowledged Tuesday that he kept Howie Roseman around last year after taking away personnel power, and sent Roseman on a sort of global quest for the secrets of sports leadership, in order to hedge his bet on Chip Kelly.

"It was always a potential," Lurie said, when asked if bringing Roseman back to run Eagles personnel at some point had been the plan all along, even as he was handing Kelly the reins after the coach demanded them early in 2015.

"At the time, it was to maximize Chip, but as I told you (in the locker room after the final game of the 2014 season), Howie had been doing a hell of a job. There was a chance for Howie to really sort of maximize his potential," Lurie said.

At the time, being nominally in charge of contracts and presiding over the training staff didn't seem like that great an opportunity for Roseman, but Howie told Sports Illustrated's Peter King earlier this month about valuable lessons he learned at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London last year, among other places.

"The whole plan was for Howie to really spend the time studying state-of-the-art decision-making around the globe in sports," Lurie said. "We really opened it up, from English Premier League, NBA, NHL, MLB, try to find who the best general managers were . . . take that year and learn from the best. They're usually open about their successes and their mistakes and where they got lucky.

"One of the things that really comes across with Howie today is the clear thinking, the strategic aspects of it all, the humbleness - not that he wasn't humble before . . . the collaboration comes across, the chemistry in the building comes across. Those are all things we wanted to incorporate into the decision-making.

"It's so often about one consistent, nonflashy decision after another, basically. It's not winning press conferences, it's not winning free agency, it's making just solid decisions, one after the other, and hopefully you make more than most of the other teams."

Roseman told King that "sometimes that's the best thing for you in business - to take a step back and learn. I was given that opportunity, and Jeffrey wanted me to learn as much as I could, and for that I'm grateful. So when this opportunity came up now, I was able to hit the ground running. I'd been thinking about so much of the stuff about building a team."

Tuesday, though the Eagles' chairman still wouldn't confirm that Roseman is the general manager again - the day after Howie got his picture taken here at the NFL meetings with the league's other GMs - the way Lurie described Roseman's responsibilities, and the responsibilities of the personnel person the team plans to hire, left no doubt, if there had been any, that Roseman is the de facto GM.

Why not call him that? Well, to fully explain, we'd need to add several hundred words of Lurie-ese that touched on the NFL's budding RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) system, in which a player hosts a chip that transmits biometric data, but basically it boils down to, Jeffrey thinks "executive vice president of football operations" is a better description of what Roseman does. He did assert that Roseman will be accountable for all the decisions made in that realm, presumably there won't be any of the nebulous "Who drafted Marcus Smith?"-type intrigue we've seen in the past.

A year ago, these meetings were in Arizona, and Lurie explained to a large crowd of reporters gathered in a courtyard that he was "very happy to provide" Kelly the resources Kelly said he needed. Tuesday, the group was much smaller, mostly the reporters covering the meetings from Philadelphia-area outlets, gathered in a cavernous hallway outside the conference rooms. This time, Lurie talked a lot about how pleased he was with Roseman's moves since Lurie fired Kelly and restored Roseman to control, a little less than three months ago.

Does Lurie regret giving Kelly control? Could he have done something to prevent the crash-and-burn season of a coach who went 20-12 his first two years with the Eagles, 6-9 in 2015?

"I think it was a necessary way to go to find out if Chip was the right guy. Let him be responsible for all the decisions that he wanted to inject and make," Lurie said Tuesday. "No question (do) I have that it was the right way to dissect whether Chip was going to be the right guy going forward or not. We dissected it and decided that, (even) with some of the great things he brought, he wasn't the right person going forward. It was helpful to have him be accountable for those decisions, so that we could move on in the right way."

Asked if this hadn't been an expensive lesson, Lurie said it was only "a time expense."

Lurie said he was "very, very happy with the offseason so far," which has seen the Eagles shed the expensive contracts of veterans such as Byron Maxwell and DeMarco Murray while re-upping core players such as Malcolm Jenkins, Lane Johnson and Zach Ertz.

"What Howie's been able to do is pretty outstanding, in terms of a league that values salary-cap space and draft choices . . . He's had a great plan, kept his nose to the grindstone and just kind of did the right thing strategically, communicates outstanding(ly) with everybody, the scouts and coaches," Lurie said. "At the moment, couldn't be more pleased . . . By no stretch are we satisfied. We've got a lot of work to do and a lot of opportunity to really improve the team. It's great having the eighth (overall) pick in the draft, as well."

Asked about the Eagles contending in 2016, Lurie suggested that this will be a rebuilding-while-contending phase.

"We expect to compete for the division title this season. At the same time, all decisions . . . it's maximizing short-term, maximizing midterm and maximizing long-term. One of the reasons for changing the resource allocation, and making those trades, was a change in the preference of how we wanted to allocate the resources, and that's a short-term impact, midterm and long-term," Lurie said. "We wanted to reallocate to other positions and other players . . . A key element in the whole thing was re-signing our best young players, we have a lot of really good young players. We wanted them all with us for the long run."

Lurie reiterated that Sam Bradford is the starting quarterback, but said he thinks Bradford and Chase Daniel "will be very competitive," and that the Eagles hope to draft a third QB.

Lurie said the player-personnel director, working under Roseman, that the Eagles hope to hire after the draft, will be someone equipped to function in what he called an "information-intensive" NFL age.

"We're all on the same page in terms of what it's going to take to process all the information," Lurie said. "I think we're about to enter a phase where there's an opportunity to really up that (batting average on draft picks and free agents). When you have a first round that's really just a shade over a 50 percent hit rate, and it goes way down from there, you've got to try to look at the big picture and do something about it. I think we're in a great situation to be able to do that.

"Whoever ends up running the player-personnel area will have to be someone who's very sort of meshing with that attitude."