Eagles don’t want a running team as ‘an organizational philosophy’
Remember those days when the Philadelphia Eagles didn’t have the Super Bowl but were seen as one of the NFL’s model franchises? Players and free agents wanted to be here. Coaches wanted to coach here. There were all of these theories that they had one of the best owners and one of the best general managers in all of football.
Success truly came before the fall. Fast forward, and despite the fact that a Vince Lombardi Trophy sits at the NovaCare Complex and a championship banner hangs at Lincoln Financial Field, we’ve experienced a complete 180-degree turn.
Free agents don’t seem to name the Eagles as one of their desired landing spots anymore. The mismanagement of homegrown talent leads one to believe that, aside from the offensive line, this team isn’t well-coached, and then, there are the theories about leadership.
Jeffrey Lurie has become everything that we used to pick on Jerry Jones for being: the meddlesome owner that thinks he knows more about football than he actually does while he empowers a vice president/general manager, Howie Roseman who seems hell-bent on proving to everyone that no one will ever have the power to bury him in the equipment room and forget about him again.
How’s that going? If you haven’t noticed, Howie is running off coaches before there’s even an interview. Some of the game’s brightest minds don’t want to be here.
The Eagles don’t want a running team, not even a winning running team.
Following the Eagles Week 8 win, there was a slight buzz building. Sure, they beat the Detroit Lions, but it was the manner in which they beat the Lions. Philadelphia had three players to exceed 55 yards rushing en route to a 236-yard rushing performance and a 44-6 win.
Everyone’s excited. Well, everyone minus the team’s brass apparently. According to Mike Sielski of The Philadelphia Inquirer, winning by way of a strong running game isn’t the route they want to take. He hung out with JAKIB Media Sports with the guys of the middle, and here’s some of what he had to say on the subject.
"I think with the way that they’re set up right now, with a young quarterback, with some depth at running back, and particularly with that offensive line, of course they should run the football more, but they don’t want to do that as an organizational philosophy. They don’t want to do it, and the thing that you have to keep in mind, and we can go way back into Jeffrey Lurie’s history for other examples, but remember Jalen Hurts was not supposed to be their quarterback this season. Carson Wentz was, and they were not going to be running the ball down people’s throats with Carson Wentz. They were going to be throwing the ball all over the place because they paid him four years and $128 million, or however much he made, to do exactly that."
There you have it, and though it’s something that we’ve already known, hearing it again makes the stomach turn.
Who would have thought? Less than four years after being promised a ‘new norm’ that ‘normal’ would be bad football and a jail sentence in a football world where the Eagles are actually guilty of everything that we accused the Cowboys of being.
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It’s 2021, and the Cowboys are again the model franchise. It’s the Cowboys who are well-coached (in spite of Mike McCarthy) while the Eagles deal with drama, the Eagles deal with the meddlesome owner, and the Eagles deal with the G.M. that wants credit he doesn’t deserve while refusing to shoulder the blame for anything that he’s actually guilty of.
Heaven help us all. This is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.