Nick Piccone
One of the more confusing things in the entire Eagles’ head coaching search was the fact that team owner Jeffrey Lurie stated that the timing of the Chip Kelly firing – or “release” – was so the team could get a head start on researching suitable coaching candidates. What he didn’t say is that the research began during the season, not after firing releasing Chip.
That research started during the season, at some point late in the season,” Lurie said Tuesday without being asked about the sequence of events that led to Kelly’s firing, “and it gave us some time to – if we needed to go this direction – be fully prepared for the search process.”
Think about that: The Eagles were still a viable playoff team as of kickoff against the Washington Redskins on Saturday, Dec. 26. Had they won that night, all they needed to do to win the NFC East was beat the lowly Giants the following week. And yet Lurie, by his own admission, already was researching potential replacements for Kelly.
When asked later during Tuesday’s press conference if the process of identifying candidates had started before Kelly’s dismissal, Lurie tried to deny that it had. But he didn’t really deny that it had.
Welp. That’s one way to go. Searching for a head coaching replacement before the playoffs were even out of the question. Surely, this past season was nothing but a dumpster fire for the Eagles, but making the playoffs would’ve had to account for at least something, right? Not according to Lurie.
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The research started,” he said. “I’ve always been one to feel you have to have research started long before you ever make a final decision, because that research is the key. You’ve got to do the legwork, or you’re going to be making it off of names. You’ve got to have, you know, so much detail of information, conversations planned, who you’re going to talk to about candidate No. 14, who are the connections that really know how that coach was when he was a coach or an assistant coach or whatever it was, who are the players [who] played for him, who are the general managers [whom] he worked with, maybe potentially owners.
It’s funny. Because if the Eagles somehow beat the Redskins and the Giants in the last two weeks of the season, they would’ve won the division and headed to the playoffs. It sounds like Lurie, by that point, had already made his decision on firing Chip. It’s safe enough to assume Lurie didn’t really believe Chip’s Eagles had a chance to win a playoff game and it wouldn’t have really mattered if they made the playoffs or not.
But, what if…? What if the Eagles made the playoffs and made an improbable run to the NFC Championship Game with all of their players seemingly hating their head coach? Would Lurie have made a change then? Hmmm…