There Are No Shortcuts To The Super Bowl

Last March, Jeff Lurie told reporters he was was tired of waiting for the Eagles to be great. He’d seen sustained success, he’d been to a Super Bowl, and he’d watched his franchise post a solid 20-13 record (including a playoff loss) over the prior two seasons. It wasn’t enough.

“I’ve lived through a lot of division championships, a lot of playoff appearances, a lot of final four appearances, but our goal is we want to deliver a Super Bowl,” he said at the time. “And sometimes maybe I’m influenced by the notion of it’s very difficult to get from good to great, and you’ve got to take some serious looks at yourself when you want to try to make that step. It’s a gamble to go from good to great because you can go from good to mediocre with changes, but I decided it was important enough…”

On Wednesday, after firing Chip Kelly before the final game of the season, Lurie didn’t walk away from his words earlier in the year.

“I said, with Chip’s vision, it was an opportunity that he wanted to lead the way, to try to go from good to great,” he said. “In fact, I remember saying to all of you, there’s dangers in that, in terms of having two 10-6 seasons in a row, and when making significant changes, you can easily achieve mediocrity. I think it would be a shame not to try, but… that is the danger when you take a risk.”

I hope Lurie learned more than that, because his "strategy" was little more than a desperate hope. He handed over all power to Kelly, a moderately successful coach with zero experience running the intricacies of a NFL organization.

The road to the Super Bowl is not paved with such gambles, with an outsider making a bunch of questionable bets that luckily pay off. You don’t win by cutting talent and building #culture. You don’t win with a rigid set of measurables that dictate player acquisition. You don’t win by ignoring critical positions and spending excessive guaranteed money on less important ones. You don’t win by overpaying for a subpar quarterback coming off two major knee injuries, or turning over half the roster in one offseason. That’s how you end up 7-9 in one of the worst divisions ever.

There are no shortcuts.

Remember Andy Reid’s binder? Reid came to Philadelphia with a detailed multi-year plan of how to build an organization. He arrived in 1999, overhauled the roster, brought in an impressive group of experienced coaches (including 6 eventual head coaches), drafted a quarterback in the first round, and went 5-11. In 2000 the team and young quarterback improved, overachieving to reach the playoffs. By 2001 they were one of the best teams in the conference. In 2002 and 2003 they missed the Super Bowl by inches. In 2004 they came minutes away from the trophy itself.

Lurie said he doesn’t want the middle steps, he just wants the Super Bowl, and he was willing to gamble to get there. But those middle steps are important. That’s how you build a champion—not overnight, but consistently, step by step.

The best teams in the NFL have the best talent. The best teams in the NFL have a top quarterback they drafted and groomed. The best teams in the NFL have smart, experienced coaches who adjust their schemes to the players they have. The best teams in the NFL have a front office structure that empowers multiple voices and balances scouting with analytics and financial understanding.

Going into 2016, the Eagles need to avoid the quick fix, or the allure of competing for the playoffs in year one of a new regime. That won't set the team up for long term success. (Plus, they'll likely be in the running anyway unless the putrid NFC East changes significantly in a year.)

The blueprint needs to be for a Super Bowl contender in 2018. Let's lay out what that looks like...

Front Office: Howie Roseman has a mixed reputation among fans and league sources, but he can succeed in the Joe Banner role. He has experience on the personnel side to pair with a firm grasp of the league's economics. Roseman does need to find a qualified general manager-type to run player personnel, someone less washed-up than Tom Donahoe, with more experience than Ed Marynowitz, who's not obvious idiot Ryan Grigson.

Coaching: A NFL team is a crazy thing to manage, and any head coach needs to be able to bring in the right people and command respect across the organization. He doesn't have to be a brilliant innovator on the cutting edge, but he does need to be flexible enough to adapt his schemes and techniques to get the most out of his players in each situation. The single most important skill set within that is the ability to find and develop a franchise quarterback, which is what makes a candidate like Adam Gase so attractive.

Quarterback: You cannot be a consistent Super Bowl contender until you have a quarterback. As such, you should exhaust every possible avenue to get one, especially the draft. I stand by my recipe for QB hunting laid out four years ago, on the eve of Andy Reid's firing:

Draft a quarterback early and late. Sign somebody in free agency. Trade for a promising backup. Rinse and repeat. You're never going to be able to compete for the Super Bowl until you find your one franchise guy. Might as well cycle through as many potentials as you can until you do. The financial cost of doing so is less than the opportunity cost of sitting pat with one player, [Bradford], who is statistically unlikely to ever become an elite quarterback.

In the Eagles' case, that means avoiding any multi-year guarantee to a still-unproven quantity like Sam Bradford, and perhaps letting him go entirely depending on the cost.

Roster Building: Outside of quarterback, which takes priority over everything else, the offensive line is next on the list of must-haves. Though I don't know many of the names, Jimmy Kempski's mock draft would thrill me based on the selection of two quarterbacks and three offensive linemen. Lane Johnson and Jason Kelce are the only long term building blocks you can count on there. Meanwhile, don't waste resources on the rest of the offensive skill positions, none of which will matter much until the offensive line and quarterback are fixed.

The Eagles defense needs more talent across the board, but it also likely needs a scheme that better takes advantage of the players in house. Kelly wanted a two-gapping 3-4 system, but it would be nice to see what Fletcher Cox and company could do in a one-gapping 4-3 instead.

Overall: Both the organization and its fans need patience. We were spoiled by Chip's quick turnaround, but where did that leave us? Let's plan for sustainability.

Offense Taken

The following is a guest post by @sunset_shazz.

Earlier today, DN columnist David Murphy published a contrarian piece purporting to show that the Eagles have neglected the offensive side of the ball in the draft under Chip Kelly. His lazy “analysis” consisted of counting up Eagles draft picks for the offensive and defensive units over the past 3 years. Even the dullest of readers can see the problem: this method equates the pick of Lane Johnson with that of Jordan Poyer. Or Zach Ertz and David King.

When pressed upon this obvious flaw by friend of the blog Noah Becker, Murphy accused his interlocutor of poor reading comprehension:

The Eagles spent 2 1sts, 3 2nds, 1 3rd round pick, and a 4th round pick on offensive players since 2013. https://t.co/avOT0i8dSu
— Noah Becker (@Noah_Becker) November 17, 2015

@Noah_Becker but i'm not going to annotate the piece for you. if you legitimately can't see it, then, yes, you are a poor reader.
— David Murphy (@ByDavidMurphy) November 17, 2015

Well, Mr. Murphy, we at McNabb or Kolb are both literate and numerate. One can easily assign values to the Eagles draft picks to determine the actual allocation of draft resources to each unit. The canonical draft value chart was developed by Jimmy Johnson in the early 1990s. For many years, this provided a sufficient first order approximation of relevant draft value. However, in 2012, the excellent Chase Stuart conducted an exhaustive analysis which used the approximate value provided by a player in his first five years with a team to construct a draft value curve; like all good scientists, he published his results.

Using these values, we can compute the approximate draft value allocated to each unit by the Eagles in the Chip Kelly era:

As is shown above, over the past 3 years, the Eagles picked 6 players on offense, at an average draft position of 48th overall. Although they picked 15 players on defense, these averaged at a draft position of 152nd overall. Using Chase Stuart’s draft value weights, the Eagles allocated 58% of their draft value to the offense and 42% to the defense; a balanced allocation, reflecting the front office’s desire to build a balanced team. Murphy’s claim that the offense was neglected in the draft is simply untrue (unless you believe a 1st round pick is equal to a 7th rounder).

Moreover, during our research we also discovered the earth-shattering news that the NFL has a salary cap. In 2015, the Eagles allocated $69.4 million to the offense, the highest(!) number in the league. To argue that the Eagles have neglected the offense in their allocation of resources is either lazy or disingenuous. Or both.

The Eagles’ woes are more prosaic: rather than being inattentive to the offense, the front office suffered from poor execution. Allowing the offensive line to age while failing to build adequate depth, using three high picks on one position in two years, guaranteeing money to the insipid Riley Cooper, over-allocating salary to an aging running back who has carried more than 400 times the previous season, cutting their best receiver for #footballreasons without recompense, trading a draft pick for a speculative upgrade at QB – these are all legitimate criticisms of the front office strategy. But accusing Chip Kelly of neglecting to spend resources on the offense… the evidence doesn’t support that extraordinary claim.

It’s one thing to mail in a column. It’s quite another to insult your readers’ intelligence when your obvious shortcomings are pointed out. Eagles fans and Daily News readers aren’t as dumb as some writers make us out to be.

@sunset_shazz is a Philadelphia Eagles fan who lives in Marin County, California. He previously wrote about Chip Kelly's Oregon bias and also contributed to the 2015 Eagles Almanac.

Coach Chip Strikes Back, Or Something

It's amazing what a win over Dallas will do for your spirits. The Eagles went into the bye week at 3-4, reeling from a loss to Carolina that wasn't particularly close. Post-bye, post-victory over a hated rival, and they're 4-4, with the wind at their back, a rejuvenated team.

All it took was a few fourth down tries, a revived running game, and a kicker that finally made a clutch field goal longer than 50 yards. Suddenly it's "the biggest win of the Chip Kelly era" (which is really saying something about the Chip Kelly era, unfortunately).

Sam Bradford is fixed. He's "continuing to flip the script on his legion of detractors". Apparently, the main issue was footwork, with QB coach Ryan Day noticing a problem three weeks back. "The results have been evident," writes the Inquirer.

Have they?

The funny thing about the win on Sunday night is that on paper, not a lot looks different from the losses earlier in the season. If you're going to give the Eagles credit for any improvement, it has to be in the run game, where they've reeled off four straight games with more than 150 rushing yards. Kelly also seems to be mixing up the play calling a bit better.

But Bradford suddenly proving he's the guy of the future? This team, suddenly a legit playoff contender? Seems like wishful thinking.

Take Bradford on Sunday. His stats were solid: 25 for 36, 69% completion rate, 295 yards, 8.2 yards per attempt, 1 TD, 0 INTs. But the funny thing about those numbers is how much they were influenced by one great overtime drive. In regulation, his stats weren't quite so good: 20 for 31, 65% completion rate, 239 yards, 7.7 yards per attempt, 0 TD, 0 INT. That's arguably worse than Matt Cassel, who completed a higher percentage of passes for more yards and 3 TDs (plus one bad INT).

The point is not that Bradford's game-winning drive has no value. But just remember that he was one Caleb Sturgis screw up or one heads-tails controversy from being the same just-good-enough-to-lose Bradford we've seen all season. If Jordan Hicks tears his pectoral muscle before grabbing that pick six, the Eagles don't make it to overtime and there is no "Sam Bradford has fixed it" narrative worth telling.

Nor, really, is there one for the Eagles, who had two weeks to prepare and narrowly avoided falling to a Cowboys team that lost 5 straight games coming in and had posted just 91 passing yards against Seattle a week earlier. This is a 4-4 team that has played a bunch of bad teams in a bad division. Luckily, they play more going forward: their next three opponents are a combined 7-17.

Maybe this group has finally turned a corner, and will cruise to 7-4 before heading to New England. I hope so. But don't be surprised if this turnaround is a mirage, and inconsistency dooms the Eagles to underperform down the stretch. That would simply be par for the course this season.

Can The Eagles Defense Carry The Offense?

Last week, I placed the blame for the Eagles' 0-2 start squarely at the feet of the offense. Despite this week's win over the Jets (yay!), Chip Kelly's favorite unit continued to perform woefully.

Yes, Ryan Mathews, subbing in for DeMarco Murray, rushed for 108 yards on 25 carries. But his numbers hide the fact that there were still far too many negative or no gain rushes (10 total). Between Mathews and Darren Sproles, the rushing game averaged just 3.47 yards per carry, a heady improvement from the prior weeks, but nothing to get excited about. Everyone on the offensive line, including Kelce, Peters, and Johnson, are struggling to run block consistently.

Meanwhile, despite being sacked just once, Sam Bradford played another horrible game. His final numbers were 14 for 28 (50% completion rate) for just 118 yards. One touchdown and zero turnovers, if you want to focus on that. But his accuracy was poor, his ball placement terrible, and he has zero guts to throw the ball downfield, one of the only things that might give the running game enough room to breathe. See more at ChipWagon, as always.

All of which leads to...

The #Eagles offense is regressing. 2013: 6.3 yards per play 2014: 5.6 yards per play 2015: 4.5 yards per play
— Phil Bicking (@p_Red) September 28, 2015

Really bad. So the question is, until the time the offense recovers (assuming that's in the cards?), can the Eagles defense carry the team? And on that front, at least, there are some promising signs. To the stats!

Through three games, the Eagles have given up the 5th-fewest points per drive (1.42), the 9th-fewest yards per drive (26.9) and the 10th-fewest plays per drive (5.6). The run defense has been fantastic—allowing a league-low of 3.1 yards per rush and zero rushing touchdowns. Most important, they've forced turnovers on one out of every five opposing possessions. To keep it going, we'll need more Walter Thurmond ball-hawking and disruption at the line of scrimmage (Brandon Bair sighting FTW).

The worrisome note is that the Eagles haven't gotten consistent pressure on quarterbacks. The defense ranks 8th-worst in sack rate so far. Overall, this isn't terribly surprising. The two-gapping scheme means players like Fletcher Cox are responsible for the run first, then the pass second. Neither Connor Barwin nor Brandon Graham are consistent man-beaters on the outside. And now the top two middle linebackers are hurt. Billy Davis needs to mix in some good blitz concepts to get pressure if this defense is going to sustain itself.

Three games is also quite a small sample size, especially when about half of that time the Eagles faced Brandon Weeden and Ryan Fitzpatrick. Luckily, due to a combination of easy schedule and injuries, the Eagles aren't scheduled to face many top quarterbacks down the stretch. The next three games match up against Kirk Cousins, Luke McCown, and Eli Manning, with Cam Newton as the pre-bye week chaser.

Still, that we're having this conversation at all is a good sign. The defense was atrocious two years ago, and improved to average or slightly above last year. If it can take another leap, that's a huge deal for this team—especially if the offense can't turn it around.

Will The Eagles Get Better?

If you watched the putrid Thursday Night Football game between the Giants and the Redskins last night, there was some solace for Philly fans. Mainly that everyone else in this division is pretty much just as #terrible as the Eagles.

That does leave room for optimism, despite two of the worst Eagles games in recent memory, strung back to back at the start of this season. The truth is that as bad as the Eagles have been, they still can turn things around. The question is whether their awful play so far is the result of fundamental, uncorrectable problems or something more fixable.

The answer to that question is in the eyes of the beholder. The offensive run blocking has been so bad that it's the worst (through two game sample size, of course) of any offensive line I can find in Football Outsiders' history. Their Adjusted Line Yards (aka roughly the yardage that the line is responsible for) is just 1.11 yards. To put that in perspective, last year's poor line was ranked 29th in ALY with 3.52 yards. Ryan over at ChipWagon can give you both the execution and scheme reasons for such failure.

On one hand, maybe this is a sign that with a historically-bad offensive line and questionable play calling, the Eagles will never get their run game together. On the other hand, we can probably expect the Eagles to revert back at least somewhat to the mean, making the run offense moderately usable at some point. (Optimism!)

Ditto for Sam Bradford. This is a quarterback who has endured very little pressure from defenses (just 23% of the time through two games). The offensive line, for all of its run blocking woes, has allowed just one sack, good for the 3rd-best Adjusted Sack Rate in the NFL of 1.5%. Yet Bradford continues to be unable to throw the ball down the field.

From @PFF, Bradford has attempted just 5 passes (5.6% of att.) of 20+ yards. 0 completions, 2 drops.
— EaglesRewind (@EaglesRewind) September 25, 2015

Bradford has averaged just 6.3 yards per attempt so far, 28th best in the league. To go with that, he's thrown 2 touchdowns against 4 interceptions and has looked out of sync with his receivers the whole time. Maybe Bradford is just bad, and Chip Kelly bet on the wrong quarterback. Maybe Mark Sanchez (barf) is actually the better choice right now. Or maybe Bradford hasn't played much in two years and is still adjusting to a new offense, new personnel, and being hit. Maybe he'll get better.

The defense, meanwhile, has shown promising signs (Malcolm Jenkins, Walter Thurmond, Bennie Logan) and worrisome ones (Byron Maxwell). The stats are slightly above average through the first two games against two potentially decent offenses. The defense certainly isn't good enough to carry an offense this bad, but it isn't the reason the Eagles have lost, either. More tests to come, though.

This weekend's game against the Jets is a must win. You don't go 0-3 and make the playoffs in this league. According to the chart below from FiveThirtyEight, that would leave them with just a 2% chance. But if they go 1-2, that's 25% and a tie for second place in a historically weak division. Then just maybe, there's room for hope...

How The NFL Chewed Chip Kelly Up And Spit Him Out

When Chip Kelly entered the NFL in 2013, many people derided his offense as a "college" or "gimmick" system, with its unconventional no huddle, quarterback read option, plus other aspects of the spread. Kelly pioneered packaged play concepts (those run-pass hybrids) and play call communication techniques like giant signs and coaches doing weird hand signals. Anyone who thought that wouldn't work was wrong. His offense rocked the league in year one, putting up big numbers and carrying a terrible defense to the playoffs.

Many Eagles fans, including myself, enjoyed a victory lap. We taunted the idiotic commentators who questioned Chip's revolution and basked in the glory of his high octane offense. He looked like perhaps the best coach in the NFL, someone we could count on for a tactical advantage for years to come.

But the dirty truth is that winning in the NFL is a result of many, many things, and scheme isn't that high on the list. Actually, scheme may be the least important—because it's the one anybody can copy or subvert. The offensive elements that Chip brought to the league are already being adopted widely. Bill Belichick and Tom Brady borrowed one-word play calls and no huddle from Chip years ago, and both concepts are now widely practiced by teams as old school as the New York Giants. The read option is overtaking the classic I-formation as the trusted standby for numerous teams with mobile quarterbacks. Packaged plays are everywhere. Even his prized sports science may soon be table stakes.

Meanwhile, Kelly has had to make compromises on his core tenets. As it turns out, quarterbacks are not fungible at the NFL level. You can't go from Dennis Dixon to Jeremiah Masoli to Darron Thomas, winning all the way. Chip has struggled to fit indecisive, immobile QBs like Nick Foles and Mark Sanchez and Sam Bradford into his offense, its purest form diluted by the slow feet and damning inconsistencies of each signal caller.

And NFL defensive coordinators are getting paid too. Gone is Chip's surprise factor. These days, the Eagles offense is more likely to be surprised by the defense than the other way around. (Oddly, Chip's offense seems to have shrunk rather than grown over the years.) Recently, for example, defensive line stunts designed by smart defensive coaches like Rob Marinelli and Dan Quinn have crippled Kelly's vaunted interior run game.

Overall, the scheme playing field is being leveled. And as that advantage fades, other factors become much more important—talent being number one. Acquiring, developing, and retaining talent is 90% of what makes a good football team in the long term. Yes, the less-talented team can luck into a win for any one game. And luck and scheme and hard work can overcome the odds over the course of a season. But if you want to win consistently in a competitive league, you need more.

Just because you're a brilliant engineer doesn't make you a good salesman. Just because you can write doesn't mean you can add. Just because you're a star performer doesn't mean you can manage others. Yet in football, teams have a habit of assuming that their coach can do much more than coach.

Kelly is a smart coach, with a novel and mostly effective scheme. But he is a woeful manager of personnel. I wrote the offseason about the cascade effect of his poor decisions, and the list was long then. But it's getting longer. Sam Bradford looks like a timid check down artist. Byron Maxwell is doing a great Bradley Fletcher impression for $22 million guaranteed. The Evan Mathis cut was questionable from the start, but is appalling now with the current state of the offensive line—a unit whose problems have canceled out any positive effect of a shiny new stable of (expensive) running backs.

In college, Chip didn't have the constraints of the salary cap or the draft or free agency. He was never the best recruiter, but he did fine; from 2010-2012, his recruiting classes ranked top 15 in the country. (At most, Oregon played 3 games a season against opponents who recruited at that level, and went about .500 in those match-ups.) Every year he added another 20-25 new players to a scholarship roster of 85, a game day pool 60% larger than the NFL. If a recruit didn't work out, there was always someone else to take his place, and none of them ever got too old and slow or cost too much money.

Under those conditions, the scheme was just icing on the cake. Kelly maximized the talent advantage he already enjoyed, and thus he won most of the time. But in the NFL, talent margins are too thin to ever make scheme a permanent advantage. Defenders who weren't smart enough or fast enough to disrupt the Oregon offense never made it to the NFL, and the best players are rationed out to professional teams, keeping the league in a constant tumble of parity. Plus, coaches are, for the most part, smarter. They won't sit back and let you call the same three run plays over and over. Oh, and you actually need starting-caliber guards to execute any scheme.

Hopefully Kelly can make some rapid adjustments this week. He needs to add new wrinkles to his play calling and consider benching one or more of his under-performing linemen. He needs to prove that Bradford was worth the major investment the Eagles made for him. The team is only 0-2, and the rest of the NFC East is putrid. There's plenty of time to come back—if he starts right now.

Still, I worry that the NFL has caught up to Chip, and Chip hasn't caught up to the NFL. Opponents are all over his early scheme innovations. But Kelly never figured out the intricacies of running all the aspects of a professional football team, the job he aspired to and finally wrested from Howie Roseman this offseason. The NFL is a lot harder than it looks on Sunday, and maybe we're finally seeing that.