Eagles fire Greg Lewis after underachieving season by WRs

WHEN GREG LEWIS sat down with a Daily News reporter after being hired to coach the Eagles' wide receivers early last year, Lewis was asked what he would emphasize, what he thought was most important, in teaching the position.

"Catching," Lewis said. "Obviously, you want other attributes that you hear people talk about on TV . . . but, at the end of the day, if you can catch, there's an opportunity for you to play receiver in the NFL, particularly with the Eagles."

The Eagles' top three wide receivers, Jordan Matthews, Dorial Green-Beckham and Nelson Agholor, all finished 2016 among the 50 worst in the NFL in drop percentage, according to ESPN Stats & Info. Agholor, the extremely disappointing 2015 first-round pick, ranked third, with six drops on 66 targets.

Wide receiver was the biggest problem area for the 7-9 Eagles, the main reason they weren't in the hunt for a playoff berth over the final few weeks. Matthews led the WR group with 73 catches for 804 yards, which ranked him 48th in NFL receiving, two slots behind Eagles tight end Zach Ertz (78 for 816).

Green-Beckham (36 catches, 392 yards) and Agholor (36 catches, 365 yards) ranked 123rd and 132nd in the league, respectively.

So it was not a shock Monday when the Eagles confirmed a Yahoo Sports report that Lewis, 36, has been fired.

It's not fair to blame the wideouts' struggles on Lewis, entirely. There might not have been a position coach in the NFL blessed with a less talented group. They led the NFL in drops in 2015, after which management allowed wide receivers coach Bob Bicknell to accompany Chip Kelly to San Francisco. But it is fair to infer that Lewis was expected to produce progress, and did not.

The buzz around the Eagles' offices last offseason was that very little nuance was taught during Kelly's uptempo practices, that Lewis would do more than Bicknell had to nurture an extraordinarily young group.

In August, management brought in Green-Beckham, a touted prospect given up on by the Titans after one season. Green-Beckham, a 6-5, 237-pound second-round pick in 2015, seemed to know virtually nothing about how to do what a wide receiver does other than run slant patterns, at which he excelled. This guy was a huge project, maybe one no coach could have turned around in the space of a season. But it was hard to tell whether Green-Beckham was any further along when the season ended than when it began.

Two weeks in a row, Green-Beckham took the same penalty for blocking downfield too soon on a screen. When reporters asked him after the second week what the rule was in such cases, Green-Beckham's answer indicated he wasn't quite sure.

In November, when Lewis sat down with reporters to talk about his troubled group, he pretended everything was going great.

Green-Beckham, Lewis said then, had "done a tremendous job of acclimating himself to this offense and learning the ins and outs of what needs to be done. He's very diligent in the classroom and after practice, on the field, he's doing all the things that are necessary to become a great player."

Agholor's struggles got worse in his second NFL season, not better. After Agholor negated an Ertz touchdown during the Nov. 20 loss at Seattle, when he was penalized for not lining up on the line of scrimmage, TV cameras caught Lewis, a former Eagles receiver, pantomiming for Agholor the act of taking a stance, then looking over at an official to check positioning. Lewis seemed a bit exasperated.

Lewis, the only Eagles wide receiver to ever catch a Super Bowl touchdown pass, came to the team as a fast-track coaching success story. He'd gone from coaching intern with the Eagles in their 2012 training camp to wideouts coach at the University of San Diego, to San Jose State, to Pitt, to assistant wide receivers coach for the New Orleans Saints, a new job each season. The Eagles position was his fifth in five years, for a guy only five months older than the oldest Eagle, long snapper Jon Dorenbos.

It seems plausible that Doug Pederson might opt for a more experienced coach this time. It also seems plausible that this year's lucky choice for the position will be given a lot more talent with which to work.

The Eagles have signed former Michigan State corner Mitchell White, who spent the last three seasons in the Canadian Football League. White won the Grey Cup this past season with the Ottawa RedBlacks. He is 26, and is listed at 5-11, 185.

@LesBowen

Blog: philly.com/Eaglesblog