Inside the Eagles' Front-Office Restructuring
PHILADELPHIA - The goal was to serve two masters: reward those who've performed well in their jobs and have been loyal to a successful organization while also replenishing a scouting staff that lost its four most important pieces since January.
When the smoke cleared the organization promoted 19 people and brought in 11 others on both the football operations and personnel sides.
Atop both departments, of course, is general manager Howie Roseman and sifting through his decisions forced many to see the shifting sands in the NFL's thinking as a whole.
Roseman doled out the assistant GM title for the first time and gave it to two of his lieutenants of the football ops side, Jon Ferrari and Alec Halaby.
You maybe remember Ferrari for occasionally being lauded by head coach Nick Sirianni for his role as the team's VP of football operations and compliance. Like most corporations, the meat of any employee is defined in the job description, not the title, and Ferrari essentially served as a conduit between the coaching staff, the personnel group, football ops, and the league itself.
In other words, a very important nuts and bolts job.
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Halaby, meanwhile, essentially led the Eagles' forward-thinking analytics department as VP of football operations and strategy. His presence has always been a bit of a sexier story to many because of the occasional disconnect between scouting and data, something Doug Pederson and even Joe Douglas balked at in some cases but Andy Weidl seemed more open-minded about.
Neither Ferrari nor Halaby are changing their day-to-day responsibilities all that much.
However, they are now the top executives on the football side of the organization under Roseman and perhaps a step closer to a GM job themselves in a league that is now considering candidates who don't have the so-called traditional background in scouting like Andrew Berry, the former Eagles' VP of football operations who is now the GM in Cleveland, and Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, the Minnesota GM whose background is in finance and analytics.
What's interesting, though, is that the two top executives under Roseman last year were split between the football ops and scouting staffs: Cat Raiche, now the assistant GM in Cleveland under Berry, and Weidl, now the assistant GM in his hometown of Pittsburgh under Omar Khan.
At least for 2022, the scouting department will not have an executive with the heft of the top two n the football ops department because there is no mirrored fill-in for Weidl.
Previously, the scouts reported to Weidl, who then reported to Roseman. From there the GM would take the information gathered from the coaching, analytics, and medical staffs before setting the team's draft board.
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Nominally, the top scouts in Philadelphia are now Brandon Hunt, who was brought in from Pittsburgh after being passed over for Khan and Weidl, and the co-directors of personnel: Alan Wolking (an in-house promotion) and Chuck Walls, an outside hire from Cleveland.
Complicating things even further is the layer of Dave Caldwell, the former GM in Jacksonville, who was promoted from personnel executive to senior personnel executive and advisor to the GM, and Matt Russell, a former Eagles' scout who was the long-time VP of player personnel in Denver and also given the title.
Those two are essentially replacing Tom Donahoe, the former senior football advisor whose contract ran out and is contemplating retirement. Russell, meanwhile, will continue to live in the Rockies so he's not going to be a daily presence.
The timing of Weidl's hire was problematic for the Eagles because the organization thought he would return short of getting the GM job in Pittsburgh.
To many, that may seem specious because the Eagles essentially fired his younger brother Casey Weidl and moved on from Donahoe, Andy's mentor but Philadelphia was working with the plan that Andy Weidl would be back unless he got the GM job with the Steelers.
The plan now is to evaluate the top scouts and then decide who will be elevated into Weidl's old vice president of player personnel role.
The hidden theme there, however, is Roseman didn't have someone in the pipeline for that spot, a nod to the prior losses of Ian Cunningham and Brandon Brown, Weidl's top two lieutenants, to assistant GM jobs with Chicago and the New York Giants, respectively.
Hunt is probably the best equipped for that job but could use more experience on the college side and the organization was very cognizant to not skip over in-house candidates.
The most curious part of all is how the NFL views front office hires and the Eagles' somewhat tone-deaf response to that reality.
The organization just went through a six-month stretch in which they could not block Cunningham, Brown, and Raiche from interviewing for assistant GM jobs because of their pecking order when it came to personnel in Philadelphia.
The same was not true with Weidl and his move to the Steelers could be viewed as a lateral one, but the Eagles were not going to block him from returning to what is essentially his family's home in Pittsburgh.
More so, Roseman is more involved in personnel matters than Khan is expected to be with the Steelers.
The larger point here is that the Eagles could be in the same boat next year if other organizations come calling for scouts like Brown, Wolking, and Walls and two of the three don't have a long history with the organization.
Ferrari and Halaby, meanwhile, are in theory a step closer to a true GM job but as much as others have begun looking at outside-the-box candidates when it comes to running football operations, the default setting for most in the NFL is still scouting and that group is the more perilous one when it comes to losing bodies.
The thought that Roseman would take this forced opportunity to reassemble his staff to better resist outside lure for his scouting staff seems to have fallen flat.
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-John McMullen contributes Eagles coverage for SI.com's Eagles Today and is the NFL Insider for JAKIB Sports. You can listen to John, alongside legendary sports-talker Jody McDonald, every morning from 8-10 on ‘Birds 365,” streaming live on YouTube.com and JAKIBSports.com. You can reach John at jmcmullen44@gmail.com or on Twitter @JFMcMullen
