Eagles' Veterans Don't Believe Transition Equals Losing
PHILADELPHIA – Not much is expected of the Eagles nationally this season with Peter King the latest high-profile reporter to tag Philadelphia as a bottom-five team in the NFL.
You can trace that lack of belief straight to the top of the NovaCare Complex and Jeffrey Lurie because it was the owner himself who coined 2021 as a "transition" when rationalizing the firing of a Super Bowl-winning coach.
However, while the idea that Doug Pederson didn't deserve to be fired conflicts with a coach hyper-focused on 2021 at the expense of a longer-term approach seemed very Sixers-like in its thinking, it was more spin than anything else.
In the end, Lurie just didn't like Pederson's plan for the coaching staff and wanted to go in a different direction but needed some type of cover-fire to steer his fan base in the right direction.
Common sense dictates that Lurie could have immediately allayed any Pederson fears about needing to win immediately so the entire explanation falls apart after about 10 seconds of thought.
Serving two masters is what the NFL is about and no team has to pull what the Sixers did during "The Process" era.
Darius Leonard on DeVonta Smith
James McKeith/SI.com Eagle Maven graphics coordinator
In a league built on the foundation of parity, one offseason with a few well-stacked decisions is all anyone is away from worst to first, even a four-win team like the Eagles.
“There’s no question we’re in a transition period," veteran All-Pro center Jason Kelce admitted last week. "We have a new head coach, a new coaching staff completely, a new quarterback. There’s a lot of change that’s happened within the building. And so, without question, we’re in a transition period."
The 33-year-old Kelce also noted the difference between the NFL and sports like the NBA where the conventional wisdom of many is you have to get really bad before you can become a championship contender with the theory being the real difference-makers are only available at the top of the draft.
"I think the biggest difference between football and a lot of other sports is that being in a transition period doesn’t mean that you can’t compete and be competitive," explained Kelce. " … We can be competitive, win games.
"We can win this division."
Admittedly there is a difference between winning a poor division like the NFC East and being legitimate Super Bowl contenders with the latter a bigger project that might include multiple positive offseasons [and a star quarterback] but the thesis still stands: there is no need for a complete teardown in this league and organizations that do spend lengthy periods near the bottom of the standings are not evidence of the opposite just indicators of what consistency in poor decision-making looks like.
The Eagles, like every other team in the NFL, have a lot of good players but most of them are thirtysomethings like Kelce, not a place you typically want to be. It's also fair to say the organization punted on turning over the roster post-Super Bowl LII for too long.
The specter of that was raised again when the Eagles signed veteran pass rusher Ryan Kerrigan last week, a player who will be 33 by the start of next season, a transaction that made at least some fearful that Howie Roseman wasn't being disciplined enough with the roster turnover again.
Roseman, though, is trying to accomplish two goals: win as much as possible this season while also putting the Eagles into a better position post-Carson Wentz by 2022 and beyond.
The latter goal has already been accomplished with significant salary-cap space on the horizon and more than enough draft capital that could include three first-round picks in 2022.
Last season the best example of a team in transition winning in a fruitful fashion was Cleveland with rookie coach Kevin Stefanski, which went from 6-10 to 11-5 and is now considered a legitimate Super Bowl contender by many as we march toward September. King, for instance, had the Browns as No. 4 in his power rankings.
Those who believe the Eagles' four-win season in 2020 was an outlier point toward the historic level of attrition Pederson's last team suffered on the offensive line, which could quickly boomerang back into a top-10 unit if Lane Johnson and Brandon Brooks stay out of the MASH unit for extended periods of time.
“I think [Jalen Hurts has] got a better team around him than other people do,” former NFL offensive lineman Ross Tucker told SI.com's Eagles Maven. “I mean, look at the offensive line, if Brandon and Lane are healthy, it’s a top-10 line all day.”
Johnson himself adds in a fierce desire to that equation.
"You get new coaches, new players, but the standard remains the same," said Johnson. "Last year was really an embarrassment for everybody involved. That’s been sitting with us and marinating all offseason.
"We do have a lot to prove."
The outsider, Kerrigan, who has had some legendary duels with Johnson, also balked at the idea of a transition.
"People forget that this team just had been in the playoffs three straight years until the last season so the pieces are definitely still there," Kerrigan noted. "That was a big, big factor in me coming here."
Planning for success down the road isn't in any thesaurus next to losing.
“I think it’s definitely win now,” Johnson surmised.
John McMullen contributes Eagles coverage for SI.com's EagleMaven and is the NFL Insider for JAKIB Media. You can listen to John, alongside legendary sports-talk host Jody McDonald every morning from 8-10 on ‘Birds 365,” streaming live on both PhillyVoice.com and YouTube. John is also the host of his own show "Extending the Play" on AM1490 in South Jersey. You can reach him at jmcmullen44@gmail.com or on Twitter @JFMcMullen
Ed Kracz is the publisher of SI.com’s Eagle Maven and co-host of the Eagles Unfiltered Podcast. Check out the latest Eagles news at www.SI.com/NFL/Eagles and please follow him on Twitter: @kracze.
