The New Model

Posted: February 5th, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Philadelphia Eagles | 1 Comment »

The Eagles hunt for an offensive coordinator took an interesting turn on Wednesday. Rather than going for a veteran offensive coordinator or an up and coming offensive coordinator, the Eagles went with no offensive coordinator at all.

So to speak, anyway.

I kinda like this.

Doug Pederson – Head coach / play-caller
Press Taylor – Passing game coordinator
Jeff Stoutland – OL coach/Run game coordinator
Duce Staley – RBs coach / Asst Head coach
Justin Peelle – TEs coach
Aaron Morehead – leading candidate for WRs coach?
Rich Scangarello – QBs coach ?
Andrew Breiner – Offensive assistant

I wrote about Taylor recently. With his background, OC might be more of a natural position for him than QBs coach.

We don’t know Scangarello’s title yet. I’m assuming he would be the QBs coach. He held that position in SF in 2017 and 2018 before going to Denver to be the OC last year.

I like adding Scangarello to the staff. He coached at the college level for 15 years, all with small schools. You aren’t having success at that level by virtue of recruiting stars. You have to out-scheme opponents and develop talent, traits that serve you well at all levels.

Scangarello coached under Kyle Shanahan in ATL and SF. I know Shanahan is catching a lot of flak for his game management in the Super Bowl, but he is brilliant when it comes to scheming, especially in the run game. I wanted the Eagles to bring in someone from his staff for that reason and also to help with the short passing game. SF led the league in yards after the catch. That’s been a weakness for the Eagles the last couple of years.

https://twitter.com/thompsonj92/status/1225102278450974720

Scangarello really is an interesting addition.

Breiner has spent a lot of time coaching under Joe Moorhead, who is a gifted offensive mind at the collegiate level. Breiner worked under him at Fordham and then took over as head coach there when Moorhead went to Penn State. Breiner joined Moorhead at Mississippi State for 2018 and 2019.

How would Breiner describe the offense he and Moorhead ran?

“It’s a multi-tempo spread offense that is gonna first and foremost always pride itself on the ability to run the football,” Breiner said. “The in vogue cliché term now is the ‘RPO,’ which Joe has done a great job with developing his toolbox of RPOs, and to be aggressive with down-the-field shots whether off a drop-back pass or play-action.

The Eagles offense will remain Doug Pederson’s offense. But he’ll now have more input from Taylor. Pederson will have new outside voices in Scangarello and Breiner. They will bring a variety of ideas from the collegiate and NFL levels.

You may wonder about going away from an OC position, but this is something multiple teams are doing. As with most football ideas, it works if you have the right coaches and the right players. The Niners got to the Super Bowl without a pure offensive coordinator. This isn’t some random idea, but rather a growing trend.

Will this group of personalities work well together? There won’t be a shortage of gifted offensive minds or interesting ideas. But the coaches have to get the ideas to mesh in order for them to work.

Pederson is usually very good at managing people so I think he can absolutely make this work.

A year from now we can judge this move, praising the Eagles for thinking outside the box or ripping them for being too unconventional.

I do like the guys they brought in from the outside so I’m optimistic that Pederson will get the most out of their ideas and the offense will be better in 2020.

*****

This was interesting.

Orlovsky is a huge Carson Wentz fan. We’ll have to keep him in mind for future staff changes.

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One Comment on “The New Model”

  1. 1 Iggles Blitz » Blog Archive » Duce said at 3:34 PM on February 13th, 2020:

    […] The two guys the Eagles did bring in, Rich Scangarello and Andrew Breiner, have the kind of new ideas the team wanted. Needed, actually. I wrote about them here. […]