Why Not Jon Gruden?

File this one under "Wish I had written it." Sheil Kapadia does a great job raising the question of Jon Gruden. When you've gone as far as having interviewed Brian Billick, Gruden starts to look very attractive:

If the Eagles looked into the Gruden possibility and decided against it, that’s OK. Maybe there are issues from when Gruden was the Eagles offensive coordinator back in the 90s. Maybe he’s making unreasonable contract demands. Maybe he wants full personnel control. Or maybe the story of how things fell apart in Tampa is even worse than we know. After all, it hasn’t been just the Eagles. No team has expressed interest publicly in Gruden this offseason. If Lurie and Howie Roseman did their homework and decided Gruden would be a bad fit, that’s fine...

Considering his comments at the beginning of the search and the nature of the process, Lurie would be making a mistake if he didn’t at least look into Gruden as an option somewhere along the line.

The Case For The Right Retread Coach

Sometimes the new shiny thing is the most attractive option. Sometimes it just seems that way.

In the Eagles head coaching search, most people are firmly against hiring a retread coach, someone who's been around the block once already. Sure, there are Jon Gruden supporters and Bill Cowher supporters, but most people would rather get Chip Kelly or Mike McCoy or some other new name. I think the Eagles probably agree with this philosophy as well. They've been strongly linked to college coaches and other coordinators, but Mike Nolan is the only retread they've interviewed so far.

Nolan is a poor candidate, if you use history as any judge. As I detailed on Thursday, Bill Belichick is the only example of a recently hired coach who went on to have great success at his second job after posting a losing record in his first. Trying to find the one diamond in the rough is a losing proposition.

But that doesn't mean that all second-chance coaches are bad. 32 have been hired since 1999 (not including KC's hiring of Andy Reid today). Many of those hires were predicated on the idea that the coach learned something from their previous failure. But I wanted to look at only the ones who earned their second shot with solid performance the first time around. I isolated 16 who had winning records and won at least one playoff game at their previous job. That list looks much more promising. Here's how they did (or are doing) in their second chance:

Let me break it down by color. Five coaches marked in blue are clear success stories. Dungy, Coughlin, and Gruden all won Super Bowls with their second team. Holmgren came close. I suppose Parcells in Dallas is more debatable, but he reversed three straight 5-11 seasons, posted a winning record, and formed the foundation of the reasonably successful Wade Phillips era. Then you have the four green coaches, who are current and relatively new hires. Three of the four — Carroll, Shanahan, and Fox — are currently in the playoffs and look to have bright futures. Too early to tell with Jeff Fisher in St. Louis.

I marked another three coaches in orange as special cases. Gibbs and Shell each came back to coaching after over a decade sitting on the couch. Hiring coaches who have been away from the game for that long is unlikely to ever work, and I doubt the Eagles are interested in any such candidates. Schottenheimer is also in this special category because Dan Snyder unwisely fired him after a single season in Washington. He won 8 of his last 11 games that year, and went on immediately to the Chargers, where he posted a solid .588 winning percentage over five seasons (although no playoff victories).

That leaves only four hires, marked in red, who really turned out poorly: Green, Seifert, Mariucci, and Mora Jr. Any coach could end up just as bad. But I look at the success rate, including three Super Bowl-winning coaches and three current up-and-comers and wonder if the Eagles could find a similarly successful retread candidate. If they avoided the Nolans of the world in favor of coaches with a winning background, they might have a greater chance of a favorable outcome. You would be looking at people who have already proven they can run an organization, win games, and get to the playoffs — even if they may not have reached the promised land yet.

Who might that be? Well, Jon Gruden is an obvious example. He did this once already, and is widely hailed as one of the smartest football minds around. Lovie Smith is another potential candidate. I've heard few rumors about where he might end up, which is surprising considering he had only three losing seasons in nine years in Chicago, and has built top defenses everywhere he's been. Both have weaknesses as candidates, but as cool as it would be to snag a hotshot like Kelly, history suggests a retread like one of them could be just what the Eagles need.

Photo from Getty.

This Is A Three-Year Job

I was trying to think of a worst case scenario for the Eagles reboot in 2013. And besides some sort of "one more year" scenario, I think the worst thing that could happen to this team is for the front office to decide they really only need to reload rather than rebuild.

There will certainly be the temptation to avoid the hard choices that come with committing to a full purge. Even with Andy Reid gone, Howie Roseman and Jeffrey Lurie may look at the large complement of veteran players that they've shelled out big money for and decide to hire someone promising a quick fix. Whether or not the hire would actually be him, Jon Gruden provides the inspiration for this selection. He went into Tampa Bay and in a year turned the Bucs from consistent contenders to Super Bowl winners. (Honestly, the outgoing coach in that scenario, Tony Dungy, makes a lot of sense in this role as well.)

On paper that sounds great. Why waste a year or two rebuilding the team when you can hire someone who promises to get you right back into the hunt? But to go this route would be to ignore the large structural problems this team is loaded with. You would be giving the Titanic a new coat of paint rather than addressing the larger concerns.

What are those concerns? How about a team that has far too many players in critical positions who are on the downhill slope of their careers. Players like Nnamdi Asomugha, who Todd Bowles is now blitzing on third down, and Michael Vick, who isn't getting any better. There's also an over-reliance on rookies and second-year players, some of whom are talented but all are inexperienced. There's a complete lack of depth at, really, every position, most notably offensive line.

Reid built the most sustained period of success this franchise has ever seen, but he didn't do it overnight. He came in with a three-year plan, and he executed. He cleaned house, picked the right quarterback, made a few key free agent signings but mostly built through the draft. This Eagles squad has been without that hard reboot for years -- and delaying it will only prolong the inevitable.

Just another reason to start rooting for losses...

Photo From Getty.

'He Reminds Me Of Brad Johnson'

Jon Gruden is not on the top of my list for the next Eagles head coach. Still, interesting to hear what he has to say about Nick Foles (whom he volunteered as the next rookie quarterback likely to start). From the LA Times' Sam Farmer:

I had [Philadelphia's] Nick Foles in the preseason against New England. Michael Vick got hurt on the fifth or sixth play, and Foles went the distance, on the road in Foxborough. If you like prototype pocket passers with some functional mobility and a tremendous amount of toughness, Foles is interesting.

What really impressed me in the preseason was they weren't running generic formations. They ran about 30 different formations out of about eight different personnel groupings in successive plays. So I see him recognizing coverages. I see him getting to second and third receivers, just like you'd want a quarterback to do in that system, and I love his NFL size. He reminds me a lot of Brad Johnson, from his football character to his ability to decipher a lot quickly, and we won a championship with Brad.

(via Tim McManus)