Philadelphia Eagles: Doug Pederson’s tenure in Philly was ultimately successful

There’s a weird perspective that longevity automatically equates to success.

If a head coach lasts over a decade with the same organization, it’s automatically because he’s successful, and if a tenure burns out in spectacular fashion, it’s solely on the coach for better or worse.

For some teams, this is very much the case. No one is faulting Bill Belichick for missing the playoffs over the past two seasons, not after winning a half-dozen Super Bowls with Tom Brady, but that is the exception to the rule. For every Belichick, there’s Marvin Lewis, who never won a playoff game after a 16-season run in Cincinnati, and for every Urban Meyer, who gets fired after one insane season, there’s a Doug Marrone or Gus Bradley, who finished out their runs with the very same team with a very unflattering wins percentage.

Doug Pederson, while currently unemployed, undoubtedly was a successful hire for the Philadelphia Eagles back in 2016, no matter what some folks will attest on Twitter.com.

Doug Pederson was with the Philadelphia Eagles for a good time, not a long time.

Alright, so where did this conversation about Doug Pederson come up? Is it because his prospects on the head coaching front have been weirdly silent since meeting with the Jacksonville Jaguars last month? Or because some folks have simply run out of things to talk about on the NFL front despite still technically being in the thralls of the postseason?

Unfortunately, it’s the latter.

When asked by… well, no one in particular about the merits of the Andy Reid tree, Dov Kleiman, an independent NFL reporter, declared that coaches developed under Big Red have largely come up flat, with only Sean McDermott and John Harbaugh being “successes.”

Now granted, instead of labeling the other camp “failures,” Kleiman opted to instead go with “fired,” and in that camp, he listed off the five coaches who served under Reid who were handed their papers. Technically speaking, that is true, Doug Pederson, Ron Rivera, Todd Bowles, and company were all fired, but that doesn’t mean their tenures weren’t successful. If anything, one can argue that Pederson’s run was one of the best in Philadelphia Eagles history.

First, the raw numbers.

As a head coach, Pederson had a regular season win percentage of 52.5. He had two losing seasons, his first and last ones, and finished out his initial head coaching run with a 4-2 record in the playoffs.

That’s all very good. On the offensive side of the ball, Pederson’s offense averaged the 15th-most points scored and the 16th most-yard gains of any offense in the NFL, with high water marks of both stats coming in the 2017 season.

Are those numbers spectacular? No, but they’re better than average, which is hard to do over a half-decade in the NFL. Want to know what else is hard to do? Win a Super Bowl, which Pederson has done, and the vast majority of the active head coaches in the NFL have not.

No, the biggest issue with the Pederson-era wasn’t his on-field success, but his inability to replace his initial cast of supporting coaches when they left for greener pastures and his unwillingness to play the game when he met with the team’s brass back in January of 2021. Had Pederson been a bit more receptive to changing things up and a bit more willing to work things out, he would likely still be coaching the team to this day, which may or may not have worked out in a positive way for the Birds, depending on how you feel about Nick Sirianni.

If Doug Pederson wasn’t a good head coach, he wouldn’t be getting interest from around the league right now. If he wasn’t a good head coach, he wouldn’t have been brought into camps around the league last season as a casual consultant last summer at the behest of his colleagues. And if he wasn’t a good head coach, the Philadelphia Eagles wouldn’t have a Lombardi Trophy prominently displayed in South Philadelphia. That all sounds pretty successful to me.