Build for the Future

Super Bowl teams are built over time. Coaches usually have a four or five-year plan. Bill Walsh won the Super Bowl in his third year with the Niners. Mike Holmgren won the Super Bowl in his fifth year with the Packers. Pete Carroll won the Super Bowl in his fourth year with Seattle. Andy Reid took the Eagles to the Super Bowl in his sixth season.

Things don’t always work this way, but coaches know they need to time to acquire the right players and install their schemes and systems.

Doug Pederson won the Super Bowl in only his second year with the Eagles. That was great and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but from the perspective of building a strong team for the long haul, you wonder if that was too much too fast.

That turned out to be a special group and a special season. The problem is…how do you duplicate “special”?

Think about the Super Bowl, the actual game. Corey Clement played the best game of his young career and looked like he was going to be a key player for the future. Alshon Jeffery made an incredible TD catch and played well. He looked like a stud receiver. Nick Foles played the game of his life. Halapoulivaati Vaitai was the left tackle in that game and got the job done. The coaching staff called a trick play at a key moment and it was executed perfectly. The winning TD came on a brilliant play design. The Eagles threw something at the Pats that they hadn’t seen.

Clement hasn’t done anything since the Super Bowl.

Less than two years later, Jeffery looks five years older. He’s not nearly the player he was then.

Big V struggles in mid-season games now.

Foles hasn’t come close to his level of brilliance from that postseason run.

The coaches haven’t had the kind of answers in the past two years that they did that day.

You generally build a strong core of players and then know you’ll add or lose some other players along the way. That core spends enough time together to develop habits and culture. Bill Walsh was a perfectionist when he ran the Niners. He had a great coaching staff that knew how to teach. They were demanding. Practice wasn’t about being “good enough”. It was about the pursuit of perfection.

Jimmy Johnson’s Cowboys were insane off the field, but great on it. The players were tough on each other. The coaches were tough on the players. Johnson was tough on everybody. He has admitted that coaching style ate at him. He didn’t do that in Miami and the results showed. Johnson said he just couldn’t keep that up. Being the bad guy 24/7 wears you down.

The Eagles lost players and coaches after winning the Super Bowl. That happens. Things were tougher than usual for the Eagles due to all the injuries over the past two years. How many games in that span have the Eagles had their best 22 players on the field? Heck, how many have they had the top 20 or even just 18?

I still believe in Doug Pederson and Carson Wentz. The Eagles still have some outstanding pieces in place. Johnson, Ertz, Cox, Graham, etc. Young guys like Derek Barnett, Miles Sanders, Avonte Maddox and Dallas Goedert all look to be key players for the future. There is more right than wrong.

That said, the Eagles do need to look hard in the offseason at how to build for an extended run. Forget about chasing the short term Super Bowl. Build a team to play together for several years. They need to be really selective about which older players stay around and which ones get added.

Jeffrey Lurie talked about the need to add a lot of players in the draft classes of 2019 and 2020. The Eagles didn’t do that in 2019. They do need to do that in 2020. This team needs young talent. And the coaches need to embrace the young players.

Don’t patch.

Don’t repair.

Build for the future.

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