The Eagles’ annual hunt for an offensive coordinator begins

For the fourth straight season, Jalen Hurts and the Philadelphia Eagles will have a new Offensive Coordinator. On Tuesday, the New Orleans Saints announced they hired Kellen Moore to be their new head coach.

That’s life in the NFL. If you’re an offensive coordinator, you have a year or two to get a head coaching job, or you get fired. So it’s good for Kellen that he got hired, but now the Eagles' search for a new offensive coordinator begins.

Thank you, Kellen Moore. Hope it works out for you.

You could argue that Kellen Moore wasn’t all he was cracked up to be this season, but he was still the offensive coordinator on a Super Bowl-winning team, and it would’ve been cool to have him back.

Moore is making one hell of a gamble because the Saints are in a truly awful and terrible spot. They don’t have a quarterback or a roster in general, they’re in perpetual trouble with the salary cap, and they have some mega-bad allegations against them right now.

On the other hand, Kellen Moore has probably always wanted to be a head coach, and now he gets to do that at 36 years old.

There was a thought that he could do the thing that Ben Johnson did with the Lions after the 2023 season — staying as offensive coordinator to have his pick of head coaching jobs in 2024. 

The problem with that is that Bobby Slowik did pretty much the same thing with the Texans, and it went horribly. He crushed it as their offensive coordinator in 2023 and stayed with the team in 2024. Unfortunately for him, the season was terrible, and he got fired. 

I don’t think the Slowik thing would’ve happened with Moore. Slowik’s success happened with a rookie, C.J. Stroud, as his quarterback, and it fell apart in his second season. Jalen Hurts, and the Eagles' offense as a whole is leaps and bounds more established, consistent, and all-around better than what Slowik had to deal with.

If Kellen signed a five-year deal with the Saints, he might stand a chance at rebuilding the franchise and getting some kind of success. Otherwise, he’ll be another head coaching casualty after three years. Hopefully, it works for him, but he’s got a mountain to climb before he gets there.

Let’s turn the page and look at who the Eagles could hire for their offensive coordinator in 2025.

Kevin Patullo

Kevin Patullo is Nick Sirianni’s dude. Those two have been together since 2018, when they were both with the Colts. Sirianni was the offensive coordinator there, and Patullo was the wide receivers coach and passing game coordinator. Then they both came to the Eagles in 2021, and Patullo was the passing game coordinator and associate head coach. If you’re wondering who he is, he’s this guy:

Aside from Patullo being with the team for so long, there are a couple of other reasons why this is the best option. The first is that it would probably allow Sirianni to keep being the CEO head coach.

If Sirianni’s OC is a person that he trusts, human nature would say that Sirianni wouldn’t try to be any more hands-on with the offense as he was this season. 

On top of that, he’s familiar with Jalen Hurts. Now, Brian Johnson was also familiar with Hurts when he became offensive coordinator in 2023, but that season is looking more and more like a fluke. Patullo knows what Jalen wants and likes, and Super Bowl MVPs tend to get what they want. An outside hire could possibly clash with that. 

Jeff Stoutland

There were only a few good things that came from Chip Kelly’s stint as the Eagles’ head coach, and hiring Jeff Stoutland as the offensive line coach in 2013 is one of them. Stout‘s since become the running game coordinator as well, which means that he just coordinated a running game that produced the most yards in a complete NFL season with Saquon Barkley’s 2,504 yards. That cannot be overlooked. 

Jeff Stoutland is the best at what he does, he’s making a boatload of money with his job, and he’s 63 years old. That’s a good situation to be in. Also, if the Eagles hired him to be the offensive coordinator and it didn’t go very well, they couldn't possibly give him a demotion or fire him because of how valuable he is. 

That being said, he’s still an option. He's insinuated that he'd take a promotion if it was the right situation and he’d probably work out well. 

Frank Reich

Hiring Frank Reich would be a mix of things: he’s a guy that Sirianni trusts, he’s never going to leave for a head coaching job (like Vic Fangio), he’s been a Super Bowl-winning offensive coordinator, and he won that Super Bowl with the Eagles. That’s all a pretty good mix.

The Eagles Super Bowl LII win was much different from this one. The 2017 team was less talented that the 2023 team, and because of that a lot of the 2017 Eagles success was due to coaching. We know Reich can coach because we've seen him do it at the highest level before.

The problem with hiring Reich is that he might have some stink on him. After he left the Eagles to be the Colts’ head coach in 2018, things went just about as poorly for him as you could imagine. He started with Andrew Luck as his quarterback and made it to the Divisional round of the playoffs. In 2019, Luck retired, and Reich had nothing to work with but broken, old, and recycled quarterbacks until he was fired in the middle of the 2022 season.

Then he went to the Panthers in 2023 and was, once again, fired in the middle of the season. 

All of this to say: there’s a chance that he might have lost his groove. Could linking back up Sirianni, who was his former offensive coordinator, help get that groove back? Maybe. Could it turn into a fireball and crash at takeoff? Also, maybe.

Bobby Slowik

Again, Slowik took a gamble on himself, and it didn’t work out, but he also had a quarterback who performed waaaay lower than expectations, a grotesquely injured wide receiver room, and an abysmal offensive line. 

That being said, that Texans offense in 2023 was pretty sick. If Slowik has done that before with lesser tools, he could do it with ones that are the best in the world. 

The Eagles hired Kellen Moore after he and the Chargers parted ways. Moore’s situation was different because the Chargers got a whole new coaching staff, but the Eagles aren’t above hiring a recently unemployed guy.

The Eagles have options here, as they should. Two of Jalen Hurts’ offensive coordinators are head coaches in the NFL, the offensive line is going to continue to be the best in the NFL, the playmakers are all going to be with the team for a while, and Howie Roseman is going to keep talent coming in the door. 

There have to be a lot of people who want in on the action. I think it’s Kevin Patullo’s job for the taking, but the other three guys I mentioned probably wouldn’t be terrible, either.