FOLLOW THIS FLIGHT PATTERN
INSTEAD OF TRYING TO COPY THE PATRIOTS, TEXANS CAN TAKE NOTES ON HOW EAGLES REVERSED FORTUNES
The Texans have tried to be New England South, but Philadelphia may be the better template to follow.
Chasing the New England Patriots by emulating the New England Patriots almost two decades into the 21st century is a waste of time, a guaranteed fool’s errand. Even Bill O’Brien, who got hired by the Texans in large part because of his Patriots pedigree, would agree. There is only one Bill Belichick. There is only one Tom Brady. There is only one Belichick-Brady partnership. Repeat after me. It’s not duplicable. It’s NOT duplicable.
A second option, however, will be staring the Texans (and all of the NFL’s other havenots) hard in the face Sunday during Super Bowl LII. It’s to be hoped that O’Brien and his new general manager, Brian Gaine, are already taking a probing look at how the Philadelphia Eagles, irrelevant alsorans themselves as recently as a year ago today, were transformed into the last team standing in the way of the Patriots tying the Pittsburgh Steelers’ record six Super Bowl championships.
Can Gaine, having returned to the Texans from a year spent in exile in Buffalo, become the 2018 Howie Roseman?
Does O’Brien need only a complete season from Deshaun Watson — there’s no plan B because the Texans don’t have Nick Foles — to prove he’s a Super Bowlcaliber coach, one worthy of a recent four-year contract extension?
Nobody, of course, can say for certain. But what the Eagles have done by going from 7-9 to claiming their first NFC championship in a decade is offer emotional sustenance to teams like Houston’s, which have critical components in place, that 180-degree transformations are possible from one autumn to the next.
Also chasing history
Doug Pederson’s Eagles are chasing history of their own. If they can deep-six the Patriots’ bid for No. 6, they’ll become only the fourth team to go from shouldering a losing record one year to holding the Lombardi Trophy aloft the next. Dick Vermeil, a man who has been there and done that, insists the formula is simpler than one might think if, he said, “you have an organization that’s working together. The general manager, the coach, his staff, the personnel department –— they have to all be pulling in exactly the same direction as one team, not as separate departmental teams.”
Vermeil, whose St. Louis Rams evolved from a 4-12 mess in 1998 into the champions of 1999 — the most dramatic transformation of the Super Bowl era — hasn’t met Gaine, although it sounds as if he helped the new Texans GM write his introductory-news conference remarks a couple weeks ago. But Vermeil, a frequent visitor to Houston because of a close personal friendship here, has gotten to know O’Brien and he insists, without equivocation, “Bill is very capable of coaching a Super Bowl team. I think with that quarterback (Watson) he’ll really get to coach the way he wants to coach and they’ll blossom offensively, like they were doing.”
Ultimately, how well Gaine channels Roseman, who returned from an in-house exile to deliver the most comprehensively productive season by a front-office executive in recent memory (and perhaps ever), will likely determine whether O’Brien possesses the coaching acumen to scale the 9-7 hump that had become his team’s redundant high-water mark until it drowned, post-Harvey, in a wave of debilitating injuries and head-scratching gaffes, a number of them committed by O’Brien.
He’s going to have to figure out his clock-management shortcomings on his own. Gaine can’t help him there. But Roseman, officially the Eagles’ “executive vice president of football operations,” showed with an astonishingly shrewd series of personnel moves — through the draft, through free agency and even through in-season acquisitions — how critically important a GM, by whatever name you choose to call the job, can be to his coach.
“Howie addressed every problem, then fixed (them),” said Vermeil, who led the Eagles to their first Super Bowl in 1980 and still lives most of the year in the Philadelphia area.
Finding impact players
Fact: All 53 of the Eagles’ points against Atlanta and Minnesota in the NFC playoffs were either scored or delivered by passes from players Roseman added to the roster in 2017. The backup quarterback-turned-season-savior Foles, receivers Alshon Jeffery and Torrey Smith, running back LeGarrette Blount and cornerback Patrick Robinson would all be signed to franchise-friendly contracts through free agency.
Other recent Roseman acquisitions include Brandon Brooks — now a Pro Bowlcaliber guard who was plucked away from the Texans in free agency a year earlier — defensive end Chris Long, defensive tackle Tim Jernigan, defensive backs Ronald Darby and Corey Graham, left guard Stefen Wisniewski and kicker Jake Elliott. Long, who left the Patriots with a Super Bowl ring to sign with Philadelphia, had two quarterback hits, two passes defensed and fumble recovery against the Vikings. Darby has had a team-high four playoff passes defensed. And running back Jay Ajayi, who has a team-best 197 postseason yards from scrimmage, was added Oct. 31 in a trade with Miami.
Starting left tackle Halapoulivaati Vaitai (fifth round) and starting cornerback Jalen Mills (seventh round) proved to be brilliant day-three finds from Roseman’s 2016 draft.
As for Foles, the once and
future Eagle who saved the season after the emergent face-of-the-franchise/MVP candidate Carson Wentz was felled by a knee injury, he’d been dumped by Pederson’s predecessor, the inept Chip Kelly who went on to become an inept front-office decisionmaker, too, after owner Jeff Lurie inexplicably gave Roseman’s duties to him as well. Fortunately for Philly, Lurie only demoted Roseman and, once Kelly had been dismissed, he re-recognized what he had in a guy who, as a 34-year-old whiz kid in 2010 was the NFL’s youngest general manager.
But Roseman, having reclaimed the Eagles’ personnel reins, brought Foles back with a two-year $11 million insurance policy to back up Wentz and here he is, starting in the Super Bowl after a 38-7 rout of the Vikings’ No. 1-ranked defense in the NFC title game.
“When Nick came back here,” Vermeil said, “I thought it was a home run for the Eagles and it has been.”
Dealing with adversity
Wentz was just one casualty. The Eagles have also overcome season-ending injuries to nine-time Pro Bowl left tackle Jason Peters, middle linebacker Jordan Hicks, return specialist/running back Darren Sproles, special teams captain Chris Maragos and kicker Caleb Sturgis because of the roster depth Roseman has been able to assemble. In other words, while the Texans had every right to whine about losing key defenders J.J. Watt and Whitney Mercilus early, it shouldn’t have turned them into 4-12 fodder.
Vermeil speaks with authority, and with audible passion, about the Eagles, whom he coached from 1976 through 1982 before taking the lengthy hiatus from the sideline that preceded his winning a ring in his third season with the Rams, a title built on strong coaching hires and deft player acquisitions. Vermeil converses “on a weekly basis” with Pederson during the season, saying, “Through Doug’s years as a backup quarterback (most famously for Brett Favre in Green Bay) and working with (former Eagles head coach Andy Reid), he developed a very good feel for what he wanted to do with the football team when he got in a position to make all the decisions.
“He put together an outstanding staff, then coached the heck out the kids. They’ve bought in. They’ve got a great attitude. One thing you notice is now they beat the bad teams badly. That’s a great sign of team discipline and team camaraderie. Another thing about Doug is he’s really good on game day. He’s as poised as he wants his quarterback to be. First, they’ll put together excellent game plans to beat the opponent they’re going to play, then their utilization of the plan within the game is flawless. They make very few mistakes.
“And evaluate where they rank in third-down conversions, in the red zone. Those are critical statistics and you’ll see that they’re either No. 1 or No. 2 in both categories.”
Vermeil was close. The Eagles ranked third in the former behind Minnesota and Pittsburgh and second to Jacksonville in the latter.
The first team to chase a losing season with a Super Bowl championship was Bill Walsh’s 1980-81 San Francisco 49ers. Walsh knew from the get-go what he had in the future Hall of Famer Joe Montana and, once he gave him the keys, the historymaking began. Two decades later, following straight on the heels of the Rams’ transformation under Vermeil, came the Patriots of 2000-01.
Vermeil, ironically, contributed to what they have become. The 1998 Rams finished 1-6 in their final seven games, but their lone victory was a 32-18 pounding of New England that surely contributed to Pete Carroll’s eventual firing and Belichick’s hiring. But genius is an elusive commodity. As with the accidental ascension of Kurt Warner in St. Louis because of a preseason injury to Trent Green, Bill Belichick finally threw Brady into the breach only because Drew Bledsoe went down.
In Houston, O’Brien needed two quarters worth of convincing to conclude Watson could be the future, if only because Tom Savage wasn’t. Sadly, six weeks and an NFL-leading 19 touchdown passes later, Watson was plucked from the huddle by a torn ACL, but hopefully his return will be seamless. Like Belichick, Vermeil can relate to how O’Brien might have been a hair slow to recognize Watson’s immediate upside.
Just as Brady languished on the bench for more than a season in New England, Warner needed outside help to force his coach’s hand. Vermeil loves to tell the story about how he’d watch Warner, the Rams’ scout-team quarterback in 1998, “pick apart our defense in practice. Every day I’d go back to the office thinking, ‘Either we’ve got a lousy defense or that kid is going to be special.’”
See, it can happen to anyone.