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Eagles headed back to the future

Since the night of Tuesday, Dec. 29, when the Eagles announced that they had fired Chip Kelly, nothing about them has become so clear as this: When it came to making a bold choice and seeing it through, owner Jeffrey Lurie never put any courage behind his convictions.

Jeffrey Lurie is better at talking about being bold than he is about acting bold. (David Maialetti / Staff Photographer)
Jeffrey Lurie is better at talking about being bold than he is about acting bold. (David Maialetti / Staff Photographer)Read more

Since the night of Tuesday, Dec. 29, when the Eagles announced that they had fired Chip Kelly, nothing about them has become so clear as this: When it came to making a bold choice and seeing it through, owner Jeffrey Lurie never put any courage behind his convictions.

Lurie likes to speak of the Eagles as a forward-thinking, risk-taking organization, always driving the train, never passengers on it. That self-image led him and Howie Roseman to hire Kelly in 2013, to bet that Kelly's unorthodox thinking about football and training would lead the Eagles to their first Super Bowl victory. After less than three years, and not quite a year after giving Kelly control over the Eagles' player-personnel decisions, Lurie decided that Kelly's brand of boldness wasn't for him.

"Whenever you make a bold choice, I'd hate to ever be risk-averse," Lurie said the day after firing Kelly. "I don't ever want to operate that way, whether it's acquiring a player or picking a head coach or whatever. It's much better to go for it than to just, you know, say, 'OK, well, other teams are doing it that way' or something like that. That's not the way we've ever operated."

Except it's exactly the way Lurie has operated in firing Kelly and reaching back into the Eagles' recent past to bring in Doug Pederson as Kelly's replacement. Pederson may very well turn out to be a fine head coach, but just about the last thing one could call his hiring is "bold" or "new" or "innovative." He arrives with the Andy Reid stamp of authenticity and approval, with a history of having already played and coached for the Eagles. There is no indication that he is anything other than an intelligent-if-conventional disciple of the West Coast offense who, Lurie and de facto general manager Roseman hope, will recapture at least some of the success that Reid delivered over his first 12 seasons as head coach.

That Lurie isn't a man of his word or self-proclaimed vision when it comes to picking head coaches isn't the most interesting part of the Pederson hire, though. What's interesting is that, for all of Lurie's Steve Jobs-like language about strategic thinking and emotional intelligence, the Eagles are lagging behind the Phillies, the Flyers, and the Sixers in their willingness to break from their traditional approaches toward constructing a winning team and maintaining excellence.

It took the Phillies a good long while, but within the last calendar year they finally began the rebuild that anyone with a semblance of foresight had insisted they begin years earlier. They traded Jimmy Rollins, Cole Hamels, Chase Utley, Jonathan Papelbon. They cracked the insular culture that had been their hallmark. They parted ways with Ruben Amaro. They hired a relative outsider, Andy MacPhail, to be their team president. They hired a total outsider, Matt Klentak, to be their GM. They have managed, in a short time, to replenish the upper levels of their farm system.

Similarly, since Ron Hextall became their general manager, the Flyers have broken from the methodology that once defined them. The notion that Ed Snider's hockey club wouldn't pour all its intangible and financial resources into the pursuit of a Stanley Cup each and every season was once blasphemous to suggest. But Hextall not only has held on to the intriguing young players and prospects both on the Flyers' roster and in their organization, but he has managed to restore some salary-cap flexibility by ridding the franchise of some onerous contracts: Chris Pronger's, Luke Schenn's, Vinny Lecavalier's.

Of course, no franchise in town has embraced change more than the 76ers. They've embraced it so much they're practically heretics. In setting forth their multiseason tanking plan, the Sixers didn't just think outside the box. They left the box in Tuckahoe, near a roadside vegetable stand, and drove to Seattle before they even started thinking. And though the recent off-court incidents involving Jahlil Okafor and the team's reaction to them were the catalyst for the hiring of Jerry Colangelo and the subsequent short-term modifications to Sam Hinkie's process, there's no getting around this: Once the 2016 offseason arrived, the tanking had to stop. The Sixers are poised to have as many as four first-round picks in this year's draft. Dario Saric is crossing the Atlantic. Joel Embiid is healing. The improvement must begin next season, and it might yet.

Compare those strategies to the Eagles' harking back to their pre-Kelly days. Thanks to the tyranny of the salary cap and the vagaries of the regular-season schedule, it's often easier in the NFL for a team to effect a one-year turnaround. But even if the Eagles were to pull off such a trick, their history since Roseman assumed power over the player-personnel department doesn't inspire confidence that any flash of success would last very long. Remember: Lurie said that he believed the Eagles were ready to win now, that Kelly wasn't getting the most out of this team, that "we have to increase the talent level and increase the performance level of those we have."

So no, the Eagles aren't starting fresh with Doug Pederson. This doesn't have the feel of a long-term, patient plan, a new direction. This is Andy Reid's former quarterback and quarterbacks coach. This is Howie Roseman running the show again. It's what has been, not necessarily what will be. In this city, on this train, Jeffrey Lurie and the Eagles are the caboose.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski