Underdogs

AN OBSESSIVE OWNER, A DESPERATE CITY

Jeffrey Lurie waited almost twenty-four years to become a world champion. Throughout his time owning the Eagles, Lurie often used the word “obsession” when discussing his quest for the Super Bowl, and once said that winning a Super Bowl is “what I think about every single day of the year.”

Lurie is not a Philadelphia native; he moved to the city in 1994 after purchasing the Eagles. But he felt like he had waited a lifetime for this. He acquired a franchise that was almost like a civic trust, the city’s fandom an inheritance from generation to generation. There is no better indicator of the Eagles’ role in Philadelphia and its suburbs than to sample the mood in the region the day after an Eagles win compared to an Eagles loss. And whenever the season concluded—whether it was after the last regular season game, a playoff game, or the Super Bowl in 1981 and 2005—there was always that irksome feeling of an unfulfilled dream. When that dream was finally realized, Lurie basked in his ability to deliver on a longstanding pledge.

“I can’t tell you how many times people come up to me wherever it is—there’s always Eagles fans everywhere—and they just… start crying,” Lurie said of his experience after the Super Bowl. “They… start hyperventilating. The stories they have with their mothers, their fathers, who they got to experience it with. I don’t know if you could explain it to fans everywhere in the country, but those of us who know the passion and the love for this football team, and how much they’ve wanted the Eagles to win a Super Bowl, it’s like it gets played out every day in a real emotional, personal way.”

Lurie never expected it to take so long. On May 6, 1994, he spent a then-record $185 million to purchase the Eagles, a team with a rabid fan base, a decrepit stadium, and little history of success in the Super Bowl era. In the thirty years before Lurie purchased the team, the Eagles totaled only ten winning seasons and one Super Bowl appearance. The Wall Street Journal panned the purchase, and Lurie wondered if he’d made the wrong decision. But he wanted into the NFL badly after a failed attempt to buy the New England Patriots, and the well-known passion of Philadelphia sports fans appealed to him. Lurie did not want to be an absentee owner, vowing that wherever he bought a team he would move there from Los Angeles. He’s now in his twenty-fifth year in the Philadelphia area, where he’s raised his two children and met his now-wife, Tina.

But when he bought the team, Lurie was an outsider (a Boston native) vowing to deliver to Eagles fans what had always eluded them. On May 17, 1994, the city hosted a celebration for the new owner. Among the thousand or so in attendance were Mayor Ed Rendell, Eagles players, Mummers, cheerleaders, season-ticket holders, and the Keystone Jazz Band.

“If I were to describe myself as any particular type of owner,” Lurie said that day, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “it would be a fans’ owner, because you really get great satisfaction when you can go out on the streets and scream you’re number one and you’re world champions.”

LURIE’S LIST

Early in Jeffrey Lurie’s ownership, he jotted down a list of what he thought were the essential tenets to a winning organization. Those included a first-class practice facility and a state-of-the-art stadium dedicated to the football team; a dynamic head coach with a strong staff of assistant coaches; a smart, creative football executive; and a franchise quarterback. The Eagles upgraded their facilities during Lurie’s first decade of ownership, checking off the first two items on the list. The other parts were more uncertain.

His first coaching hire came in 1995 when he tabbed Ray Rhodes to lead the team. The Eagles achieved early success, reaching the playoffs in Rhodes’s first two seasons and going 1–2 in the postseason. Then came two substandard seasons that forced Lurie to examine his next move. Lurie would later realize why Rhodes failed to produce a championship. “We didn’t have a franchise quarterback, so it was not sustainable,” he would say. But at the time, the failure to deliver cost the coach his job.

After the 1998 season, Rhodes was dismissed and the Eagles made a bold decision to hire Green Bay Packers Quarterbacks Coach Andy Reid, who had no coordinator experience and did not top any lists of hot coaching prospects. But Lurie and team president Joe Banner were sold on Reid’s long-term vision, a sign of his organizational skills and leadership qualities. Reid didn’t find much need to explain his plan to the public; he had the support of his bosses. The first step was picking their franchise quarterback. The Eagles chose Donovan McNabb with the No. 2 overall pick in the 1999 draft—the same selection the Eagles used on Carson Wentz seventeen years later—even though it was not met with universal approval. McNabb was famously booed on his draft day by a bus full of Eagles fans who trekked up the New Jersey Turnpike to New York City because they wanted running back Ricky Williams. The McNabb pick proved to be the right one, and together with Reid he led the Eagles to one of the most successful periods in franchise history. From 2001 to 2004, the Eagles made the NFC championship game every year. They lost in three consecutive Januarys before finally breaking through to reach Super Bowl XXXIX—where they faced the New England Patriots, Lurie’s childhood team and the franchise he once tried to purchase. The Patriots beat the Eagles that evening, spoiling the Eagles’ chance at a Super Bowl and solidifying a Patriots dynasty that would continue for years to come.

In 2008, Reid and McNabb would reach one more NFC Championship game together, but again, they went no further. A couple years later the Eagles tried loading up for another run with Michael Vick at quarterback, but lost in the first round of the playoffs two seasons in a row. After fourteen years, Reid’s tenure in Philadelphia had run its course. The Eagles parted ways with Reid after he posted a 4–12 record in 2012, then hired Chip Kelly, the University of Oregon’s innovative head coach who represented a significant shift from Reid. Kelly brought an up-tempo offense, a devotion to sports science, and—as it later turned out—an abrasive personality leading to internal griping about his interpersonal skills. Still, the Eagles reached the playoffs in Kelly’s first year, and optimism grew in Philadelphia.

AN ELUSIVE SUPER BOWL

By 2014, twenty years had passed since Lurie bought the team. There was one Super Bowl appearance, five NFC championship games, and zero parades up Broad Street. While the fans had grown restless, Lurie explained that he felt the sting more than anyone else. That did not assuage the Lincoln Financial Field tailgaters, though, and they let him know it whenever they could. But Jeffrey Lurie remained resolute about his core beliefs. The faces changed, the facilities were updated, yet Lurie still sought the right combination of quarterback, coach, and personnel executive. He was convinced it would eventually materialize.

“I anticipated it being difficult, but I thought if you can get to four, five, six championship games, or get to the playoffs the majority of the years, as we have, then you’d have the luck that would transcend whatever strengths or weaknesses you have,” Lurie said. “Other teams have had that. We haven’t. If you keep the same values and the same passion to do the best you can, that’ll right itself over time.”

It didn’t happen with Kelly. The team collapsed in the final month of the 2014 season to miss the playoffs. Then throughout the 2015 season, after major front-office and roster upheaval orchestrated by Kelly, Kelly’s ship sank as trust in him had eroded. Lurie fired Kelly during the final week of the season, not even waiting until after the finale. Disappointed that the locker room and organization were muddled in low morale, he now sought a coach with “emotional intelligence,” one who realized the fragility of a locker room and who could help rebuild the organizational culture. Lurie began the process of hiring his fourth coach, seemingly no closer to the Super Bowl than he was in 1994. The hope from the fan base renewed every summer, but patience thinned and skepticism mushroomed.

After firing Kelly, Lurie took out the checklist he keeps in the top drawer next to his bed and added a new requirement for a successful franchise: chemistry. That elusive, immeasurable, all-important element in the locker room and the organization that breeds real success. Lurie had come to embrace the value of culture in a franchise’s success, both among the players and between the coaches and the executives in the front office. In fact, one of Lurie’s prevailing lessons between the Eagles’ two Super Bowl appearances was the “absolutely paramount importance of collaboration and a selfless locker room culture.”

It would be easy to confuse that motive with seeking what’s comfortable and finding someone who can placate those in charge. That perception only became more pronounced when Lurie hired Doug Pederson as head coach in January 2016. Critics of the decision charged the Eagles with trying to recreate the Andy Reid era, since Pederson was the first quarterback Reid signed and was later his assistant coach in both Philadelphia and Kansas City. (Of course, with nine playoff appearances in fourteen years, there could have been worse eras to emulate.) Pederson was an unheralded hire—no other team interviewed him for a head coaching position—but Lurie said he “checked the box on everything.” In Pederson, who was forty-seven at the time, Lurie saw a “smart, strategic thinker” with “unparalleled” communication skills, and found him “comfortable in [his] own skin.” Lurie seemed unworried about how the hire would sell. After two decades, he had learned the standings sell more than the sizzle.

“The fans just want to win,” Lurie said. “In picking a new head coach, it’s not about winning the press conference. It’s just about picking the best leader, and it was very clear to us that was the way to go.”

The Eagles’ search had started with two thousand pages of information on twenty-five candidates. That list was soon pared down to six available coaches. The Eagles spoke to two internal candidates and four from outside the organization. Multiple reports suggested the Eagles were trying in earnest to hire Giants offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo, but then the Giants swooped in and offered him their head coaching job. That created the perception that Pederson was not the top choice. Lurie insisted otherwise.

“At the end of the search,” Lurie said, “this was an easy call.”

After Pederson’s hire, Lurie once again consulted his list. He had picked his new head coach and felt good about his staff. The facilities, with continued investment in renovations, were in great shape. He thought he had made strides toward creating the culture of collaboration required to win. But he still needed a franchise quarterback. He also needed someone who could figure out how to get one. Fortunately, that man was already in the building.