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The Fixer wrote: »

someone who is friends with tom gambles' son just told me that chip kelly is resigning tonight. No word if it's true he is going to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a gay porn actor.

Happy New Year!!!

spot on.

http://www.csnphilly.com/football-philadelphia-eagles/jeffrey-lurie-had-no-choice-put-chip-kelly-charge

Jeffrey Lurie had no choice but to put Chip Kelly in charge

Howie Roseman (left) received a promotion and new title, but in shaking up the Eagles' front office, owner Jeffrey Lurie (middle) put Chip Kelly in charge of player personnel. (USA Today Images)

Eagles owner Jeff Lurie had no choice. He did the only thing he could possibly do in the long-term interest of the team he’s owned for more than 20 years.

He demoted the one person in the organization he’s closest to.

The Eagles are calling general manager Howie Roseman’s new role a promotion (see story). But let’s be honest. They gave him a contract extension and a fancy corporate title, but in reality, Lurie wiped Roseman of his key general manager duties five days after telling reporters Roseman would “absolutely” return in 2015 as the Eagles’ general manager.

By doing so, Lurie found a way to restore some much-needed health and sanity to the Eagles’ teetering front office and retain head coach Chip Kelly, who has led the team to consecutive 10-6 seasons after replacing Andy Reid.

To put Lurie’s relationship with Roseman in perspective, keep in mind that Lurie sided with Roseman when Roseman and Joe Banner were locked in a power struggle a few years ago. And Lurie and Banner were boyhood friends. Lurie hired Banner one day after buying the Eagles.

In the years since, he has promoted Roseman every opportunity possible and kept Roseman on the personnel side while losing valuable execs like Tom Heckert, Jason Licht, Ryan Grigson and — just a couple days ago — Tom Gamble, Kelly’s hand-picked personnel guy.

Roseman is a good man who’s worked tirelessly to study personnel and learn how to select players, but his strength is and has always been contracts, salary cap, money.

And it took a furious Kelly following Gamble’s dismissal for Lurie to finally realize that the fractured front office was limiting the Eagles’ success.

Despite his intense loyalty to Roseman, he knew deep down that a front office with good people being forced out on a regular basis, one with a general manager alienating people around him, simply was not going to lead to the championships he’s been chasing for two decades.

So this time, instead of keeping Roseman happy and eliminating whoever his latest rival was, Lurie took powerful action.

Necessary action.

Five days ago, when Lurie was asked after the Eagles-Giants game in the visiting locker room at MetLife Stadium whether Roseman would return as GM, he laughed and shook his head and said, “Is that a real question?”

When told it was, he replied, “Absolutely.”

But the model wasn’t working.

The Eagles haven’t found a Pro Bowl defensive player in the first four rounds of the draft since Lito Sheppard in 2002. They haven’t drafted any Pro Bowl defensive player since Trent Cole in 2005.

Only twice in 10 years since the Super Bowl season in 2004 have the Eagles won a playoff game — 2006 and 2008. The last playoff win came against the Giants six years ago.

And after meeting with Kelly over the past few days, Lurie changed his mind. Something had to change, and it had to be Howie. That had to be incredibly difficult for Lurie to accept and act on, but he did what he did for the long-term health of the franchise.

The Eagles have a better chance to reach a Super Bowl today than they did yesterday.

After 12 years in personnel and five years as general manager, Roseman as of Friday evening now holds the title executive vice president of football operations. According to the Eagles, he’ll continue to be in charge of salary cap and contracts and “NFL strategic matters” and also oversee the training and equipment staff.

And if you don’t think this is a demotion, how would you like to go from picking players in the draft and signing free agents to overseeing the equipment staff?

Kelly keeps the title of head coach but like Andy Reid a decade ago, he will oversee the player personnel department, the team said in a release. His first duty will be to hire a new personnel executive, presumably a general manager.

It’s an incredible amount of power for a guy who’s been in the NFL for a few days less than two years and hasn’t won a playoff game. But Lurie believes Kelly was a special hire, a special football mind, and he’s banking his franchise on it.

It was clear the status quo wasn’t working. Lurie could have kept Roseman and maybe found a way to keep Kelly for another year, and the Eagles might have won 10 more games and maybe made the playoffs.

But he knew that wasn’t a model to win a title.

Ten years ago, the Eagles were in the Super Bowl. With a healthy front office consisting of Lurie, team president Joe Banner, general manager Tom Heckert and head coach Andy Reid, the Eagles went 59-21 from 2000 through 2004 — the fifth-best record over a five-year span in NFL history.

I asked Lurie that week how important it was for a successful team to have a healthy front office with guys who like each other, respect each other and work well together.

“The way Andy, Joe and Tom work together and the job they've done is a huge part of the success we've had," Lurie said that day at the team hotel in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. "There's just such a great sense of, 'We're all in this together,' and when you have that, you eliminate all the negativity that you find so often with the people running football teams.

"Joe, Andy and Tom are just very low-ego guys that recognize that, as a group, you can accomplish more than you can as individuals who are more concerned with self-promotion and personal agendas.

"When you're not concerned with who gets the credit, you don't expend any wasted energy. You're just focused on doing the right thing for the organization and the rest is irrelevant.”

Banner, Reid and Heckert are all long gone. And so is the remarkable success the Eagles experienced in the first half of the 2000s.

Since the Super Bowl season, the Eagles have won just three postseason games in 10 years. Only twice from 2005 through 2014 did they advance to the second round of the playoffs.

Lurie had to do something strong, something dramatic, or the Eagles were fated to continue as a second-tier team. Winning more than they lost but ultimately achieving nothing.

If Kelly is the brilliant football mind Lurie believes he is, this was the only way out.

Lurie had to take strong action. He had to end years of front office turmoil if he was going to get his franchise back pointed in the right direction.

A resounding loss for Roseman, a tremendous victory for Kelly and an elegant resolution for Lurie.

pjhawks wrote: »

love the media and fans in this town who balked at Reid for having authority over the roster but somehow now it's a good thing Chip Kelly does. people make me laugh.
.

actually, no. gotta know your history. modrak left in 2001 and reid brought in tom heckert to be director of player personnel (which is what chip is looking for right now). and they worked together. nobody had a problem with that. things worked great. when heckert left in 2009, roseman technically was elevated to replace him, but it was assumed that reid was running the show himself up until the 2012 draft (this is the time when people thought he had too much on his plate).

chip's gotta find his tom heckert, essentially. then it will be like it was over a decade ago, not like it was during the last few disastrous years when reid was running the show by himself. and, for what it's worth, i think a large part of the media and fans are not in favor of this move.

imalive wrote: »

The Juggler wrote: »

imalive wrote: »

philly sports are dead, for now.

been a rough year!

amazingly tho, not as bad as NY.

I guess that should make me feel better but it doesn't. Haha

Cliffy6745 wrote: »

imalive wrote: »

The Juggler wrote: »

imalive wrote: »

philly sports are dead, for now.

been a rough year!

amazingly tho, not as bad as NY.

Rangers went to the Stanley cup finals. Both baseball teams were better. Overall a very bad year though

Well...at least our basketball team sucks on purpose

imalive wrote: »

eeriepadave wrote: »

The Juggler wrote: »

imalive wrote: »

philly sports are dead, for now.

been a rough year!

we still have Villanova basketball :-S

I just noticed they lost yesterday.

and juggler is all pissy about the Cowboys win.

Rightfully so. But they didn't cover, so it's not a total loss. Hey oh.