Section 215
Fansided

Eagles Should Not Consider Reinstating Howie Roseman as GM

By Tim Kelly

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This is a crazy time for the Philadelphia Eagles, not a time to act crazy.

It hasn’t been a calendar year since Jeffrey Lurie declared that Howie Roseman would ‘absolutely’ be back as Eagles’ general manager after the Eagles defeated the New York Giants in week 17, which allowed them to finish their season at 10-6.

2014 was the second consecutive season the team finished at 10-6, only this time they completed the biggest December collapse in team history to finish at a disappointing 10-6, after starting 9-3, a far cry from how they finished the 2013 season.

Chip Kelly used that late-season collapse as a spring-board to eventually make Lurie change his mind and demote Roseman while giving Kelly full control of player personnel.

It would take an entire other article (at least) to go through each individual decisions that Kelly made with that control. Needless to say, after back-to-back embarrassing defeats that saw the Eagles give up a combined 90 points, the team doesn’t seem to be heading in the right direction under Kelly.

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Roseman, 40, hasn’t been seen much publicly throughout the course of the season, but he remains very much in the organization as the vice president of football operations. It’s also safe to assume that Lurie, who seemed to have a father-son type relationship with Roseman, hasn’t forgotten about this, and hasn’t closed the door on ever giving him a role in player personnel again.

Some fans, given how the first season under Kelly’s personnel control has transpired, believe that Roseman should be handed personnel control again after the conclusion of the 2015 season. They believe that Kelly single-handedly tore down an organization that won 20 games in his first two seasons, and he therefore deserves all blame.

While it’s becoming increasingly harder to make a case for Kelly keeping personnel control, if he keeps his job at all, Roseman should not even be considered a candidate as the team’s next general manager for a multitude of reasons.

It’s telling of how Roseman’s tenure was going that many who have worked with him don’t seem to have gotten along with him. Tom Gamble was unceremoniously let go of on New Year’s Eve, and he was Kelly’s hand-picked personnel guy, so one would think that was more of Roseman’s doing than Kelly’s.

How Kelly feels about Roseman, both as a person and an executive, should be clear by the power-play that he executed shortly after Gamble’s dismissal that allowed him to gain personnel control.

Roseman’s negative perception around the league doesn’t stop there.

ESPN’s Louis Riddick, who is about as impressive of a professional as you will find, worked for the Eagles from 2008-2013. Riddick started as a pro scout, but eventually was the team’s director of pro personnel. In a January interview on 97.5 the Fanatic, Riddick said this of the recently demoted Roseman:

"“He has been a constant there through a lot of the change,” Riddick said of Roseman. “It’s no secret. I don’t think him and I will be sharing any Christmas cards anytime soon.”“I think what’s happened now is it’s the way it should have been for a long time. Let’s put it that way. Now, they’ve finally.. They’ve cleaned it up. Now the people who are doing what they should be doing are doing what they should and the people who shouldn’t have been doing what they were doing .. aren’t.”“Tom Gamble, you can throw myself in there, they’ve had quality football people there. People who know the game. People with big personalities. Let’s just say they went into Philadelphia one way and left another way.”"

Roseman, according to a 2013 report from Penn Live, isn’t thought of well by Bill Belichick or potential head-coaching candidate Josh McDaniels either.

"A potential sticking point for O’Brien regarding the Eagles job could be their new general manager Howie Roseman. The club’s 37-year-old salary cap guru is known to be held in low regard by O’Brien’s mentor, Patriots coach Bill Belichick, and by another strong O’Brien contact, former Broncos head coach and Patriots assistant Josh McDaniels."

Even CBS’ Jason LaCanfora, who has no experience as an executive but certainly has access to plenty of people who do, wrote this of Roseman during the team’s extensive head-coaching search in 2013.

"Rather, very different chatter has been growing in NFL circles for weeks. What’s up with the Eagles job? Why don’t guys want it? What are their concerns?I wish I had a dollar for every time someone told me one esteemed coach or another advised one of the Eagles’ top candidates not to take the job precisely because of Roseman’s presence there. Roseman isn’t the general manager they should tie their wagon to. It’s clear Chip Kelly wasn’t leaving Oregon for anywhere unless he had a large measure of control over the organization, and owner Jeffrey Lurie has already entrusted that to Roseman. There has been trepidation by some candidates to go all-in given the questions about this existing power structure.The rumblings about Roseman lacking nuance and foresight, about him turning people off with how drunk with power he’s become, only grow louder as his coaching search grows stranger."

Kelly of course did change his mind and take that coaching job, though eventually had a power struggle with Roseman, leading to the organizational set-up that Lurie currently has in place.

Had Kelly or Gamble simply not gotten along with Roseman, that could have been chalked up to a one-time power-struggle. But what does it say about Roseman as a co-worker that virtually any person that’s worked with him, and some who have just had to deal with him around the league, seem to think he’s a poisonous personality?

None of this is to say that there aren’t individual moves that Roseman made with personnel control that weren’t successful. His 2014 trade of Bryce Brown, who effectively has done nothing since leaving the Eagles, netted the team a fourth-round draft pick. The 2012 draft class, one that Roseman apparently had full control of, produced Fletcher Cox, Mychal Kendricks, Nick Foles and Brandon Boykin, among others. Even his 2013 draft class, one that certainly had influence from Kelly and Gamble, featured Lane Johnson, Zach Ertz and Bennie Logan, all of whom have developed into very good players.

But for as good as those two classes were, it’s also assumed that Roseman led the 2014 draft class, at least to some extent. He reportedly talked Kelly out of taking Jordan Matthews in the first-round, which he was correct to do, but Kelly then says he was the one who had ‘final say’ on picking Marcus Smith. He also used the team’s fourth-round pick in that same 2014 draft to select the recently re-acquired Jaylen Watkins.

Kelly’s fingerprints are all over moves from the 2014 draft like taking Josh Huff in the third-round and Taylor Hart in the fifth-round because both played for him at Oregon. And while it’s easy to look at Martavis Bryant, who was taken in the fourth-round and get upset at Kelly, these two players that he apparently coveted have produced much better than Smith and Watkins, who seem to be Roseman’s picks.

I’ve also found the criticism of Kelly not replenishing the offensive line corps difficult to assess, because it isn’t wrong, but building an offensive line isn’t a one season process. If you can blame Kelly for not having replacements for Todd Herremans and Evan Mathis, or finding any sort of successor to Jason Peters that didn’t involve sliding Johnson across the line, doesn’t Roseman shoulder some of that same blame for not leaving Kelly better young talent?

Another thing worth considering is that Roseman was the one who initially signed and then brought back Cary Williams and Bradley Fletcher for a second season, which was the biggest cause of the team’s 2014 collapse.

Next: Eagles All 22: How to Compete With the Patriots

So for some of the very impressive moves that Roseman has made in this organization, he’s also had some clunkers. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve another chance to be a general manager somewhere else, but when you couple some of his poor moves with how much he apparently struggled to work with people, that chance shouldn’t be here.

Many people in Philadelphia fear that Kelly is too stubborn and has already accumulated too much baggage to be successful with the Eagles. If Kelly needs to fail to adjust, that’s an unfortunate, extremely Philly type of break, but it is what it is. Roseman, who seems to be detested by some in the organization and has made some fire-able personnel decisions, may be in the same boat, which why it makes little sense to give him back control of an organization that wasn’t headed towards a Superbowl under his tutelage.

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