Once the ink was dry, the sale was complete, and Jeffrey Lurie’s $195 million purchase of the Philadelphia Eagles was approved by his new NFL peers, the historically scattershot franchise’s new 42-year-old steward set his sights on Palo Alto, Calif.
It was 1994. Having made a name for himself in the movie business, and now set to pursue another passion, Lurie was determined to build a first-in-class football operation. At the time, the San Francisco 49ers were the gold standard not just in the NFL, but all of professional sports—and the Eagles would face them in their fourth game of Lurie’s ownership. So as soon as the schedule came out, Philly’s new boss lined up a side trip to Stanford.
Bill Walsh was in the final year of his second stint as coach there and, among all the people Lurie wanted to mine information from in the football world, the Niners icon topped the list. Walsh, of course, didn’t just establish a winning program in San Francisco. He’d built one strong enough to withstand losing Joe Montana and even its architect, Walsh, with George Seifert and Steve Young about to guide the franchise to its fifth championship.
Looking back now, Lurie took a lot from the meeting. A few things stuck.
“It was maximizing the roster and realizing when you had some descending players what you needed to do, either to get market value or plan around [their departures],” Lurie said, a day before winning his second Super Bowl. “These are all potentially unpopular decisions. So, for me, really, philosophically, I believe you do what you think correlates with winning big—and not what’s popular.”
What Lurie and the cast he’s assembled in Philly have accomplished isn’t just popular now.
It’s the envy of the NFL.
It’s a program so sturdy that it’s won with different quarterbacks and coaches and general managers, and seemingly gets stronger and stronger—mirroring, in many ways, what Walsh, Eddie DeBartolo and Carmen Policy once constructed in San Francisco. It’s not immune to losing good people, of course. Rather, it’s become a machine in finding, developing and maximizing those kinds of people, producing a pipeline that doesn’t run dry.
Eight days ago, that machine once again spit out a Lombardi Trophy, with the Eagles defeating the Kansas City Chiefs in New Orleans. This time, it happened not just with a different head coach and quarterback than the pair that led the Eagles to their first Super Bowl title seven years ago. It happened with just four players total left from the 2017 team: kicker Jake Elliott, long-snapper Rick Lovato, All-Pro right tackle Lane Johnson and former Pro Bowler Brandon Graham.
Jalen Hurts is in Nick Foles’s place. Cam Jurgens is in Jason Kelce’s old spot. Josh Sweat is where Vinny Curry was, Darius Slay and Quinyon Mitchell are in the spots that Jalen Mills and Ronald Darby had then, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Meanwhile, the foundation remains.
The offseason’s here. And we’ve got plenty to cover this week. So over in the Takeaways, you’ll find …
• Some more on the New Orleans Saints finding their next head coach.
• Details on the Aaron Rodgers divorce in New York.
• A look at where the Jacksonville Jaguars’ GM search stands.
But we’re starting with one last look at what exactly made the Eagles world champs—again.
The laying of that foundation really started with Lurie’s experiences with both of his pro sports role models: Walsh and legendary Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach, whose teams Lurie grew up rooting for in Newton, Mass. But it kicked into high gear with the arrival of Andy Reid in 1999. Reid was actually Lurie’s second head coach hire (Ray Rhodes was first), and Lurie teamed him up with president Joe Banner and GM Tom Modrak, and later Tom Heckert, to begin shaping the vision that Walsh and Auerbach helped Lurie form.
By then, the wheels were turning on flipping the physical infrastructure of the team, with a new practice facility, the NovaCare Complex, and the stadium that would become Lincoln Financial Field, deep in the planning stages. The idea was that to create what the Niners had (DeBartolo was legendary for showering his players and staff with first-class amenities), Philly needed to up its game. Lurie was committed to doing it in every way.
The organization that once played on the green concrete of old Veteran’s Stadium would soon have the nicest grass field in football, despite its Northeast climate. The team’s East Coast trips, to places such as East Rutherford, N.J., Baltimore and Washington, D.C., would be made in luxury liner buses. The food in the cafeteria would be top of the line. The weight room would be pristine. The sports science, which came along later, would be ahead of the curve.
Everything was pointed at giving the players the very best.
"When they know that they’re going to be fed well, they’re going to have all the resources to take care of their body, they don’t have to go elsewhere and spend their own resources on it, and that’s going to make them be able to play longer because they’re able to take care of their body and make more money,” current GM Howie Roseman said, “that’s a huge win for organization.”
It helped to form what was at the core of what Lurie was looking to construct—culture.
Along those lines, where Walsh gave Lurie the lessons in how to make decisions and how to build the roster, seeing Auerbach’s Celtics over the years showed the Eagles’ owner what needed to be the heart of a team that wins over eras. Those Boston teams invariably were the best passing teams, the best rebounding teams, the best defensive teams, and at the soul of those teams was Bill Russell, an unselfish superstar who set the tone for everyone else.
“To me, culture is incredibly important to us and it’s an easy word to say these days, but somebody asked me, How is this different?” Lurie said. “The last several years, all your Super Bowl or championship game appearances, they all have excellent culture. This team has a superb culture, but so did [the team] two years ago, so did [the team] six years ago, so did all the teams in the championship game with Andy.
“Culture is a core allocation of resources because you emphasize it, and you make sure as best as you can by who you bring in, how you develop those players, how you manage their development both psychologically and athletically and how you have that family atmosphere was big. How do you create that? Football is a tougher sport because there’s so many on your roster, so it’s just been an incredibly high priority to sustain it.”
Lurie then added, “You can go through different coaches, you can go through different quarterbacks, but you better have a great culture.”
And while the roster had to have it, Lurie knew from the beginning that it couldn’t just start there—it had to be all over the organization.
Jake Rosenberg was plucked from the financial sector, off a trading floor, to work for the Eagles in 2012, and spent a dozen years there—becoming the team’s vice president of football administration in ’18—before leaving to launch his own consulting firm after the ’24 draft. And what he saw in his time as a right-hand man to Roseman was a team, and owner, creating edges for itself by taking chances and risks others wouldn’t.
No idea was dismissed out of hand. No expense was spared.
“You create this organizational approach, as opposed to being only a GM- or head coach-focused operation,” Rosenberg said, while paying proper deference for a GM and coach he worked with, and who he holds in highest regard. “Those guys come and go, results are fleeting, you’re subject to drafts and all kinds of different things. But the quality and depth of the organization is sustaining year after year, and continuously gives you edges even when those other things, they’re all mean-reverting for the most part.
“When you spend the time and resources to build out those other areas and make sure everyone in their respective area is better than other people doing the same job, those become almost like permanent advantages.”
And the Eagles have been legitimately creating those edges since the 1990s. In fact, in the early years, when Reid, Banner and Modrak/Heckert were running the show, they were cultivating what would be characterized now as “analytics” to uncover inefficiencies.
One study they did was to try and find commonalities in starters uncovered in the fourth round or later. They found that a large percentage of them fit into one of three categories: They were either undersized, went to a smaller school or were injured for their final season in college.
That, in Reid’s time, blazed the trail to finding three Cincinnati Bearcats—Trent Cole, Brent Celek and Jason Kelce—outside of the first four rounds of the draft that became foundation pieces for the roster. All three fit two of the Eagles’ late-round categories, with Cole having been injured not only for his final college season, but also the combine; Celek was on the shorter side for his position, and Kelce was a bit light for a center.
Then, there was an added emphasis on digging out undrafted free agents. Most teams, back then, would pluck undrafted guys simply to have enough numbers at each position for training camp—if you had, for example, two quarterbacks after the draft, you’d go get a third that way after the draft concluded. What the Eagles saw was different, in that having those guys make their team, because they came so cheap, would create an advantage in creating more space to pay both their own veterans, and poach players from other teams.
It’s counterintuitive to the way many NFL GMs and coaches work, since most see a college free agent making the roster as a potential indictment on a previous decision they may have made on a highly drafted guy or big-money free agent. The Eagles, consciously, decided long ago not to care about that.
“I always felt there’s a great advantage in talent-evaluation analytics; these are ways you can literally revolutionize or reform a franchise—and how could you not try to maximize that effort?” Lurie said. “It started in football operations where you want to be as good as possible by having the best odds of making great decisions. It comes down to a lot of talent evaluation, psychological evaluation, medical evaluation ….
“We were very much … it wasn’t called analytics in those days, but it was what correlates with winning and that was a big barometer for sort of mapping for how to allocate salary cap resources because that’s a big difference-maker.”
In that way, you could argue the Eagles stumbled into all this, to a degree. The cap was new then, and that was a good area for Philly to find edges, through those early conversations with Walsh. Those talks led to a link to one of his proteges, Mike Holmgren, and a string of meetings at league events in the 1990s, and those conversations eventually led the Eagles to Reid, and a whole new way of doing business.
The Eagles’ facility—which sits on a property across the street from the stadium that feels a little like a college campus—is still, all these years later, state of the art. And part of that has been born out of need with constant remodelings necessitated by a growing staff.
This is another area where Lurie’s team has found an edge since, after all, there is no cap on spending on your coaching staff, or your personnel department, or football operations in general.
Philly’s always had a bigger build-out than other teams, starting with the team being a forerunner in football analytics, establishing an entire department for it. That’s where Alec Halaby got his start as a summer intern while he was a student at Harvard in 2007—he came aboard full-time three years later when Roseman became GM.
During the Chip Kelly era, the team invested deeply in sports science and nutrition, taking much of what Kelly had done at Oregon, and growing off it, while overhauling the way it approached practice and the ramp-up toward regular season games.
During the Doug Pederson era, the team brought Jon Ferrari over from the league office to handle rules and compliance. And within those five years, after going through a string of injury plagued seasons, the team also revamped its medical process, hiring Dr. Arsh Dhanota from Penn as chief medical officer, who streamlined communication between athletic training, strength and conditioning, nutrition and sport science within the building, and blended medical data from those areas with subjective feedback from the players.
Meanwhile, Connor Barwin was among a crew of ex-Eagles players that Roseman hired, and he eventually carved out a role running a reimagined player development department, where he’d ensure that the bottom of the roster was being developed like the top of the roster was.
All of it is an offshoot of the tone Lurie sets—wanting his team to be the Microsoft of football, always pushing the envelope, never constrained by old norms, and never, ever afraid to bring a new idea to ownership, no matter the expense.
“He’s involved in every aspect, in terms of wanting to hear the decision-making process, wanting to make sure we’re not doing things that are risk-averse,” Roseman said. “We’re doing things that put us in a position to win. Once he hears the why, he’s incredibly supportive."
That extends to Roseman himself perhaps more than anyone else, who had a year of exile in 2015, after losing a power struggle with Kelly. Having been marginalized and moved to the other side of the building, Roseman and Rosenberg asked Lurie if they could spend their time (and some of the owner’s money) traveling to study other organizations in other sports, to try and test the Eagles’ best practices, and see if there was a better way.
No one, at the time, knew where or when the ideas would be applied. But Lurie told them to go ahead and mine for those ideas.
So the two spent time with big-league teams in MLB, the NHL and NBA, and some minor league baseball teams, too. Roseman spoke at a conference in London with San Antonio Spurs architect R.C. Buford that year, and used the trip to visit with Premier League soccer clubs at their home facilities. Outside of sports, they met with venture capitalists and leaders of large companies. Not all the ideas correlated directly. But what came from it was a mentality that things “may not look the same as baseball but can be a whole lot better.”
Which, really, only reinforced the way Lurie wanted his guys to be thinking.
Way before this, in the aftermath of guys such as Antonio Gates making it big in the NFL, the Eagles actually assigned scouts to the NCAA basketball tournament to find guys athletically predisposed for football. After spending time with all those teams, the thought became, Why not do more of that? In Buford’s Spurs, Roseman saw an example of a team that was working the whole world to find talent, and coming up with guys such as Manu Ginobli and Tony Parker.
That, of course, wouldn’t correlate directly to football—basketball is playing globally at a much higher level than football. But if it was worth it for an NFL team to find someone like Gates in college basketball, the thinking went, wouldn’t similar athletes exist in other sports in other countries that could play? And if the Eagles could use what they’d learned in seeing a baseball team develop a 16-year-old kid who didn’t speak English, or a basketball team effectively bring a raw player along in the G-League, wouldn’t that accelerate things?
That, in a nutshell, became Jordan Mailata. The Eagles spent a seventh-round pick on him, because he was a freakish athlete coming out of Australian rugby league, and they didn’t want to risk him going somewhere else as a college free agent—out of picks at the time, Roseman actually traded back into the seventh round to get him. They did it after Roseman sat down with Lurie, and they agreed they’d give Mailiata two years on the 53-man roster, and not expose him to waivers, on their belief they could develop him.
It may be the first time in NFL history a team has made that sort of internal commitment to a guy drafted in the 2000s. Mailata signed a three-year, $66 million extension in April, and was the Eagles’ starting left tackle in Super Bowl LIX.
Of course, these sorts of projects and additions aren’t free.
Someone has to pay for them, and that someone has been Lurie.
“My philosophy is …” Lurie said, pausing for a second to consider the question. “You’re obviously trying to run a sound business, but I think success is determined by your success on the field and your success in the community. And so anything you can do to maximize those two, the value of the team is going to be appreciated more by your performance and your reputation in the community than anything else. It’s not going to be the EBITDA in a certain year, or two or three or four.
“There’s a reason we just sold limited partnerships for the highest price in sports history. It wasn’t based on being the most profitable team at all. It’s based on the performance over time and the reputation in the community and the forecasting of where we hope to be able to sustain over the next multiple years. It’s much more than the financial bottom line. Now I guess you could get criticized by some Wall Street analysts, but we don’t operate that way. We just don’t operate that way.”
Indeed, Lurie sold 8% of the Eagles in December to two family investment groups, with the valuation of the franchise coming back at $8.3 billion. That meant Lurie got $664 million, or roughly three-and-a-half times what he paid for the entire team in 1994, for a small percentage that, as he sees it, will allow him to continue investing back into the team.
And those investments have continued to bring the best and brightest to Philly, enabling them to grow after their arrival. Halaby and Ferrari have ascended to assistant GM posts under Roseman. Young scouts such as Chuck Walls (Green Bay), Jeff Scott (Washington) and Brandon Hunt (Pittsburgh) have come from other organizations, as guys such as Joe Douglas, Andy Weidl and Ian Cunningham were plucked away, and become influential. They even hired another guy—Browns GM Andrew Berry’s brother Adam—out of the finance world.
And just as the coaching staff was backstopped this year with about $9 million spent on coordinators Vic Fangio and Kellen Moore, the personnel department has experienced hands in ex-Jaguars GM Dave Caldwell and ex-Broncos exec Matt Russell as advisors.
The machine has kept humming.
As a result, the coaches hired have been positioned to hit the ground flying. Kelly, Pederson and Sirianni all made the playoffs within their first two years. That’s not to minimize, of course, the job those coaches have done—Sirianni’s ability to steady a ship that easily could’ve rocked off-kilter at so many points this year was invaluable. It is to illustrate how the amount of support in place has given those guys the best shot to prosper.
“He’s done fabulously well,” Lurie said of Sirianni. “One of the beliefs I have and Howie has is the head coach’s role across the league is way too complicated and difficult. We can embrace their personality, embrace their style of leadership, but not give them so much on their plate to go from play-calling to 30 other things. … Every single coach we’ve hired has had double-digit wins in their first two years and there’s a reason they’re not overwhelmed.
“They’re able to do what they do best and we want to maximize what a head coach can do best, because it’s a complicated job.”
In turn, if so many coaches and scouts are positioned to do what they do best, the chances of getting the best players on the roster, then maximizing those players go up.
And that is the area where Lurie has poured the most resources.
The Eagles have a dozen players making more than $10 million per year, with that group’s total average salary per year adding up to just over $251 million. The same 12 guys count only for a little more than $107 million on the cap. There’s no magic to that—getting that number that low is a matter of simple accounting. But there is commitment it takes from ownership, with it enabling the Eagles to stack the roster by spending way over the cap.
Eventually, there will be a price to pay for all that. But the point is that not every owner is willing to write the checks to consistently spend beyond the league’s limits like Lurie. So when you heard for two weeks that the Eagles had football’s best roster, as it prepared to take on Reid and Patrick Mahomes, and then saw that manifest at the Superdome?
None of it came together by happenstance.
At the center of all this is Roseman, who has expertise in all areas after, earlier in his career, being questioned as a GM without the traditional background—something that has proven, over the years, to be a strength, not a weakness.
And perhaps Roseman’s greatest strength is his ability to pull this all together. Those who’ve worked with him marvel at his desire for more information—information from any avenue he can get it—his ability to retain that information, and then his acumen for distilling it to what’s relevant. From there, he’s decisive.
“One of the real strengths of Howie, amongst many, is how he’s able to synthesize input from so many different categories of analysis to reach a final decision,” Lurie said. “In any company, any business, you can become reductionistic. And when you say it’s one thing or it’s two things? We try to avoid that reductionist thinking … It’s the valuable input from many sources that creates, hopefully, a sound decision on what to do.”
And a sound decision doesn’t always mean the right decision.
In the early years, Lurie, Reid and Banner would tell their staffers that it was O.K. to be wrong as long as the team’s batting average stayed high—a reference to the idea that even the best personnel department, like a good hitter in the big leagues, is going to fail a lot.
“Process over results,” Roseman said. “At the end of the day, if you have a good process and bad results, you can sleep at night. If you have a bad result and a bad process, then you’ve made a huge mistake. That’s really what it comes down to.”
And if the process is good, and it’s run over and over again, in time, the result will be, too.
So when the strikeout has come, the key has been giving the team enough at-bats to make up for it, through accumulation of assets. It’s Mailata already being in the pipeline when 2019 first-rounder Andre Dillard didn’t work out as Jason Peters’s heir apparent. It’s getting DeVonta Smith and A.J. Brown in ’21 and ’22, and not hanging on to misses on J.J. Arcega-Whiteside in ’19 and Jalen Reagor in ’20. It’s taking not one but two corners in the top 40 in last year’s draft, Mitchell and Cooper DeJean, to fill a need.
Just the same, it’s having Jalen Carter, Jordan Davis and Milton Williams in place when Fletcher Cox retires, and Jurgens and Landon Dickerson capable of playing center when Kelce walked away in the same offseason as Cox.
In short, it’s not one thing. It’s everything.
That, essentially, has become the culture that Lurie sought 30 years ago—an organization so vast and full of knowhow that it could withstand pieces being removed. And the idea was never that those pieces weren’t valuable on their own. It was that the Eagles would have so many of them that losing some of them wouldn’t undermine the rest.
“It doesn’t guarantee success, but why not have that? You got a choice. How do you want that culture to be?” Lurie said. “It’s a beautiful thing. I mean, we’ve been aligned for so long, really in a good way, both philosophically, aggressiveness—Don’t ever be risk averse, focus on the core aspects of roster development that are most important and don’t be afraid to admit mistakes and operate off those. It sustains a lot of the things we’re doing.”
And, ultimately, bears results like the one all of them got eight days ago.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jeffrey Lurie’s Holistic Approach to Eagles’ Operations Paved Way for Super Bowl Titles.
