Getting rid of Kelly might be a step forward
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. >> As the Eagles hustled into the tunnel Sunday at the Meadowlands and then ducked into their locker room, they were trailed both by a season’s worth of disappoint-and the man who will decide why they occurred.
Head down, security posse leading the blocking, poker-faced even after his team’s 35-30 victory over the New York Giants, Jeffrey Lurie ran into the room just before the slamming of its door. Inside, he told his handlers that he would not resurface for a Q-and-A with the press, as had been his end-of-the-season custom. So when next seen, presumably, he will be delivering the answer to one, just one, question: Was it all Chip Kelly’s fault? Maybe it was. Maybe it was, after all. Though the Eagles had just staggered to a 7-9 season, they were hardly the first pro football team to commit postseason-free football. Few, however, had been to be so disappointing in the process. Whether accurately or not, the Eagles had emerged from the preseason as the NFL’s trending hot team, equipped with a new quarterback, three layers of star-level running backs, a pricey free-agent cornerback and a coach who had produced twin 10-win seasons in his two years in charge. Lurie had the right to expect a season’s worth of the excellence it would show in Week 17.
“This season wasn’t what anyone wished for or thought of,” DeMarco Murray said. “Obviously, we have to reflect on that. And that makes us hungrier.”
With the starting players involved throughout and with the spirit of the rivalry with the Giants never fully suppressed, the Eagles performed with pride and precision, clearly emerging proud of themselves. That meant that before the season and at the end, they played as they were expected. It was in between, when they barely could do anything right for a head coach accused of ignoring them in training-complex hallways and being unable to relate to them anywhere else on the premises, that was the problem.
So where Lurie may earlier have been inclined to jackhammer the coaching staff, the roster and the next three years in a tactical trust-the-process imitative, he suddenly had multiple reasons to reconsider. For one, Sam Bradford, who’d been growing more effective later in the season, had just uncorked one of his best games, completing 30 of 38 passes for 320 yards and two touchdowns. And then, Bradford, a free-agent-tobe, endorsed interim coach Pat Shurmur as the replacement for Kelly. It was Shurmur who’d coordinated the Rams’ offense when Bradford was the Rookie of the Year \.
“I would love to play for him,” Bradford said. “I really enjoyed playing for him today. Obviously, I hope he gets serious consideration.”
As recently as Tuesday, that idea would have sounded ridiculous. Not only is it usually useless to fire a head coach and promote an assistant, but Lurie had made it plain that he wanted his next head coach to be a communicator. And while Kelly’s offensive coordinator, Shurmur traded mostly in say-nothing clichés and other turn-off-the-fans babble. Free, though, to take charge Sunday, Shurmur projected honesty and joy, sharing enough football information to make his postgame obligation informative and friendly. Including Andy Reid’s 14 seasons, that had been missing from Lurie’s operation for 16-plus years.
“We were all out there just doing our jobs,” Shurmur said. “But they had fun doing it.”
Lurie will meet soon with Shurmur, among other candidates to replace Kelly. Unfortunately for Shurmur, none likely will drag that 9-23 record he’d concocted in two seasons as the Cleveland Browns’ head coach into the process.
Shurmur, though, will have be able to brandish something the other hopefuls will lack: The promise of continuity.
“No matter what they do, we will get it right with whoever comes in,” Brandon Graham said. “But Shurmur would be a good candidate, man. I respect him as a coach.”
He’d be a fine candidate if Lurie believes what so many did before the season, that the Eagles were good enough to contend. Same thing if Lurie believes what so many do at the end: That there wasn’t much wrong with his club that shedding Chip Kelly could not reverse.