Feb. 9, 2026
Jeff Stoutland, the best position coach in Eagles history, is gone.
Kevin Patullo, the worst offensive coordinator in Eagles history, is not gone.
Any questions so far?
Yeah, the Eagles are following up their disappointing 2025 with a dreadful start to the offseason. And what’s even worse than losing Stoutland – and the near-departure of defensive coordinator Vic Fangio – is the inside look at organizational dysfunction that these decisions are revealing.
The departure of Stoutland would be epic under any circumstances. The fact that Nick Sirianni was the main reason behind the move should alarm those blindly loyal fans who still don’t see the head coach for the clueless pretender he has always been.
During Stoutland’s 13 seasons with the Birds – including two Super-Bowl wins – the no-nonsense 61-year-old offensive line coach developed Jason Kelce and Lane Johnson into Hall of Fame players, made an Aussie rugby behemoth, Jordan Mailata, into a Pro Bowl tackle and turned a first-round bust, Mekhi Becton, into a (one-year) star.
And yet, when the wheels began to come off the 2024 Super-Bowl juggernaut this season, Sirianni did something so illogical, so damned stupid, that he basically set into motion the disaster that followed.
Six games into the 2025 schedule, Siriianni removed the duties of run-game coordinator from the proud veteran coach and – without telling Stoutland – split them between two failed play-callers, Patullo and himself.
The only part of the story that is hard to believe is that Stoutland didn’t tell Sirianni to go bleep himself right then. Think about it. Everybody except the head coach knew at that point that Patullo was inept at the OC job, and no one more so than a football maven like Stoutland.
Who paid the price for the Patullo disaster?
Would you believe it was Jeff Stoutland, of all people?
It is a tribute to Stoutland’s professionalism that he absorbed the news that the two frat boys would be taking over his run-game responsibilities without blowing up the season right there. Publicly, he said nothing. Privately, we now know, he seethed.
When he was watching Super Bowl 60 yesterday, Jeff Stoutland knew better than anyone that the only reasons the Birds weren’t playing were the OC who couldn’t call plays and the head coach who prioritized friendship over success.
And the final twist to all of this madness is that, while the best OL coach in the NFL is preparing his resume again, Patullo still has a job with the Eagles, albeit in an unspecified position. What isn’t clear is why owner Jeff Lurie and GM Howie Roseman have allowed these lunatics to take over their asylum.
By now, they still aren’t sure Sirianni has no clue who to hire and how to deploy his staff?
What more do they need to see?
Ironically, no one is a bigger victim of the current coaching debacle than Roseman himself. The Eagles still have the best roster in the NFL, a roster he created. The offense still has elite players at quarterback, running back, tight end and two at wide receiver. The only thing lacking was someone smart enough to coach them effectively.
And on defense, the brains of the entire Eagles coaching operation was coordinator Vic Fangio, who lost half of his starters in the off-season and somehow still improved his unit from the championship season.
Understandably, Fangio is not happy right now, either. It should shock no one that the two oldest assistants, Stoutland and Fangio, 67, have both reached the point of no return with Sirianni. (Fangio reportedly has agreed to return next season, but his commitment seems fragile, at best.)
I don’t need a news conference to get some answers, nor should you. The two veteran coaches have watched enough elbow-joint high-fives among the whippersnappers on the coaching staff to seek the comfort of a warm beach or a team with a more compatible bunch of coaches.
(If you read Stoutland’s statement carefully, you will note there’s nothing about retirement in it. He just doesn’t want to coach in Philadelphia anymore. As for Fangio, he has agreed to stay next season, but the reason for his reluctance is the same: Sirianni.)
So why is all of this happening? If Lurie and Roseman were willing to fire their previous Super-Bowl winning coach, Doug Pederson, over dubious coaching hires, why not Sirianni?
Two reasons. First of all, Sirianni doesn’t push back. He’s not exactly a Mensa member, but he knows he wouldn’t survive the yes-demanded leadership of his bosses. And second, Sirianni just won a Super Bowl. It’s really hard to fire the coach the next season without revealing an organizational rot that would undermine Lurie’s business-savvy narrative.
Instead, Lurie and Roseman unwittingly appear to be handing Sirianni just enough rope to finish the job next season. With yet another play-caller who has never called plays, without the OL coach who performed miracles, and with a head coach who has never been able to solve problems, the end of Sirianni’s lucky tenure seems inevitable now.
The shame of it is that Jeff Stoutland couldn’t end his career in Philadelphia, the scene of his greatest triumphs. Stoutland was so talented, he adapted to the disparate personalities of head coaches Chip Kelly, Doug Pederson and Nick Sirianni, all while creating the most consistently effective offensive line in team history.
Now he’s gone.
And Kevin Patullo is not.
If you have no problem with this brazen injustice, congrats. You are now qualified to join Nick’s fraternity.
For one final season, anyway.
In case you missed it last week, it appears the 76ers have quietly started a new Process.
Last week, in the final stages of a turbulent decade that won the team No. 1 draft pick Joel Embiid and zero championships, GM Daryl Morey traded last year’s first-round draft selection, Jared McCain, to the Thunder for a first and three second-round picks.
Then came the fatal words confirming the start of another Process. At a news conference designed to polish the turd of his trade-deadline failure, Morey acknowledged that the McCain deal was about tomorrow, not today.
“We felt that the draft picks would help us more in the future,” he said.
The future? Huh? The whole idea of tanking for four long seasons was that the organization could then stress the present over the future. Now we’re back to making moves for the future again? Seriously?
Even worse is what Morey’s words imply – that he plans to be around, screwing up the team, for the foreseeable future. The fact that the Sixers haven’t even sniffed a conference final in Morey’s six years here seems to be surprisingly low on the list of the organization’s concerns right now.
Hmmm. Why could that be?
It isn’t because the trade of McCain snuck the Sixers under the luxury-tax threshold again, saving money for billionaire owner Joshua Harris. Hey, Harris is a certified carpetbagger, but come on. He isn’t placing a few bucks above a chance to win a championship.
Naw. It couldn’t be that.
I saved my thoughts about Super Bowl 60 until the end of this blog post because, well, I really don’t have much to say beyond my overriding belief that neither the champion Seahawks nor the pretender Patriots were as talented as the Eagles this season.
Those two teams made it to the big game because their coaching was far superior to the Eagles’. If you watched that listless dud of a contest yesterday, you already know that, I’m sure.
Thank you, Nick Sirianni and Kevin Patullo for denying the best NFL team its proper place on the biggest stage.
The truth is, probably because I went into the game already bitter about the season, I hated pretty much everything about the four-hour extravaganza.
All of the pregame stuff was predictably overblown, Charlie Puth’s anthem was a slog, Cris Collinsworth of NBC was laughably dishonest trying to pretend the game was interesting, and the Bad Bunny was a visual event cloaked in a language many of us don’t understand and undermined by a voice that was unpleasant, if not grating.
What bothered me the most about the night was the realization that it may be a while before the Eagles are back at the Super Bowl. The veteran players will all be a year older next season, and a year slower. They will still have a coach calling plays who has never done it before. Now they even have a defensive coordinator who may not want to be there.
And they have a head coach who has been unmasked as a fraud.
Is there anybody left out there who likes Nick Sirianni?
Why?