Old habits are hard to break, but Philadelphia Eagles’ owner Jeffrey Lurie is going to have to break one if he hopes to hire the greatest head coach the team has had since Dick Vermeil. The habit Lurie has is trying to reinvent the wheel with each coaching hire. With Andy Reid, Lurie hired a guy who was a quarterbacks’ coach and few had ever done that before. With Chip Kelly, he went for the guy with the innovative offense that was supposed to revolutionize the NFL, and that was a nice idea for awhile.
Those reinvented wheels fell off and now Lurie will have to conclude that an already constructed wheel, Sean Payton, would be the best guy if and when he becomes available. Lurie’s stated goal is to win the Super Bowl and Payton is the very guy who knows how to do it, having won the Super Bowl with the New Orleans Saints. That in and of itself is galling in the sense that the Saints are an expansion team founded in 1967 that won it before the Eagles, a founding member of the league in 1933.
Lurie will have to resist any notion that he’s smarter than the other owners and go after Payton harder than anyone else. The attraction could be mutual. Payton grew up in the western suburbs of Philadelphia. He also saw first-hand the kind of talent the Eagles already have in place on Oct. 11, when the Eagles beat the Saints, 39-17. Payton knows there is talent he can work with in Philadelphia.
That’s where the hard part comes in because the Saints would likely want a No. 2 draft pick for Payton and the Eagles traded their No. 2 for quarterback Sam Bradford. Still, giving them a No. 2 for a guy who knows the shortest route to the Super Bowl would be worth the swap, so they would probably offer the 2017 second-round pick, and the Saints might go for it.
If Payton is the guy, it will only take Lurie a few months to realize it.
