Jeffrey Lurie is now the second owner in NFL history to make the Super Bowl with three different head coachesGetty Images
The Eagles have “reached the NFL’s biggest stage in only their second season since an organizational reset,” according to Mark Maske of the WASHINGTON POST. The “rapid return to the Super Bowl is a testament” to Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie’s “adherence to his long-held convictions about how to build a successful NFL team and the roster-construction prowess” of his GM, Howie Roseman. Lurie dismissed coach Doug Pederson after the 2020 season, saying at the time that Pederson “didn’t deserve to be fired, but the two had differing versions of the path forward.” Lurie: “I thought the values and the culture were all there.” He added, “We just had to sort of regenerate the way we did before the last Super Bowl and needed new energy." Lurie acknowledged that “part of being right about a coaching hire involves luck.” The franchise that hired coaches Andy Reid, Pederson and Nick Sirianni during Lurie’s ownership tenure “did also hire” coach Chip Kelly. Lurie said that the Eagles knew Sirianni was “a football junkie.” He added that they “weren’t concerned” about “‘winning the press conference’ or landing the heralded candidate.” It has taken only “two seasons, amid that ongoing fine-tuning, for the Eagles’ reboot to put them back in the Super Bowl.” Lurie: “We’ve always been a believer in building through the draft. And you have to be extremely aggressive in every other way we can find talent and sometimes think outside the box” (WASHINGTON POST, 2/10).
GOOD STUFF CHEAP: The WALL STREET JOURNAL’s Andrew Beaton wrote the Eagles are back in the Super Bowl because they are a “forward-looking franchise that ignores football orthodoxy to unlock value and spend money efficiently.” In this case, they “defied an old cardinal rule of roster construction that says a team with two quarterbacks actually has none.” Roseman: “I think the opposite.” He added, “At the end of the day, it’s the most important position in sports.” Philadelphia traded QB Carson Wentz to the Colts for “first and third round picks -- or far more capital than they used to draft” QB Jalen Hurts. Beaton writes part of the “brilliance of the Wentz trade was how it also allowed the Eagles to reset their financial clock.” Dealing Wentz “left them with a chunk of dead money against the salary cap in 2021,” but after that they were “free of the big contract they once gave him.” Hurts’s rookie deal, meanwhile, “costs them a paltry average” of $1.5M a year. For 2022, that “allowed them to flex their financial might and build one of the NFL’s best rosters around Hurts.” They traded a first-round pick to acquire star WR A.J. Brown and they signed LB Haason Reddick. Those moves “were available to them only because they had Hurts for cheap” (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 2/9).
DESERVES SOME CREDIT: In Philadelphia, David Murphy writes the “conventional wisdom” says that the Super Bowl is a “place for master planners and developers.” Reality is, it is a “place for architects and remodelers.” Winning in today’s NFL is “about making the most of the resources and space at one’s disposal.” The Eagles and the Chiefs are here at Super Bowl LVII “because of the way in which they have managed to reinvent themselves in a short period of time.” For the Eagles, it “meant parting ways with the coach and the quarterback around whom they’d structured themselves.” It meant “taking targeted swings on the trade market and waiting to find value in free agency.” More than anything, it meant “finding a coach with the right mentality for a young team in transition.” Roseman and Lurie “deserve credit not just for their decision to unload Wentz, but to do it in a way that allowed them to quickly build a competitive team" around Hurts (PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, 2/10).
HEADED TO CANTON? In Philadelphia, Reuben Frank wrote Lurie “is a Hall of Famer,” because he hired Reid, Pederson and Sirianni. Lurie has the “magic touch when it comes to hiring head coaches, and he’s now one of only two owners in NFL history to hire three Super Bowl head coaches.” In his 29 years leading the Eagles, he has "shaped a losing franchise for most of its first 62 years into a model organization, a consistent winner." There are 15 owners in the HOF. Frank: "I don’t think there’s any question that one day Lurie will join them" (NBCSPORTS.com, 2/8).
