A really good rule for professional sports organizations to follow is that good head coaches of good teams keep their jobs, and bad head coaches of bad teams get fired.
The Philadelphia Eagles (who beat the Chiefs 40-6 in Super Bowl LIX) just showed that they are a good organization by giving Nick Sirianni a “multi-year extension” on Monday, May 19, 2025. Meanwhile the Giants (a BAD organization) are still farting around with Brian Daboll.
Sirianni becomes just the sixth (maybe seventh) Eagles head coach to get a contract extension. This begs the question: What happened to the other guys who got one?
The Eagles’ mostly bad history of extending coaches
In the Eagles' 91 years (almost 92 years) as a franchise, they have an all-time record (regular and postseason) of 667-665-27. Up until the beginning of the Nick Sirianni era, that record was 613-642-27.
When a team has that kind of overall record, they go through head coaches at a pretty significant clip; the Eagles are currently on their 24th one. Depending on what actually happened contract-wise with Greasy Neale, Nick Sirianni is the seventh coach to get an opportunity to stick around for longer than he initially agreed to.
Earle “Greasy” Neale, 1941-1950:
If Greasy Neale’s Eagles didn’t win the NFL Championship games in 1948 and 1949, I probably wouldn’t list this because it happened so long ago. Fortunately, history is written by the winners.
I wasn’t able to find anything about Neale’s first contract that he signed with the Eagles, but I did find a picture of him signing a “new contract” in 1949. After he signed that contract, he went 11-1 in 1949 and 6-6 in 1950.
After a Week 9 loss to the Giants, Neale and the owner, Jim Clark, got into some kind of old-timey shouting match. During the offseason, Neale was on vacation and got a telegram from Clark essentially saying that he was fired.
That means that Greasy Neale was the first Eagles head coach to sign a contract extension/a new contract, and he only coached for two of the three years … and he was fired one year after he won the championship.
Jim Trimble, 1952-1955
Jim Trimble got hired after a mess of a head coaching situation in 1951. The Eagles gave him a three-year contract after two seasons (1952 and 1953) of winning seven games and being the runner-up in the division.
In 1954, he was right there again with a seven-win, yet second-place team. Unfortunately, in 1955, he bucked the trend, and his team went 4-7-1. Like Greasy Neale, Trimble was fired after just two years of his three-year deal.
Joe Kuharich, 1964-1968:
This one was wild. The Eagles' owner, Jerry Wolman, hired Joe Kuharich on a five-year contract in 1964, but after Vince McNally resigned, the Eagles gave Kuharich a crazy 14-year contract. Part of his job was to be a head coach, and part of it was to be a de facto general manager.
After the 1968 season, Wolman sold the team to Leonard Tose. Tose saw a mondo-sized contract for a bad head coach and fired him, more or less (it was a settlement). That means Kuharich was out of his contract over a decade early, so this one is an obvious outlier.
Rich Kotite, 1991-1994:
In 1992, Norman Braman gave Kotite a contract extension through 1995. Then, Braman sold the team to Jeffrey Lurie after the 1993 season.
During the 1994 season, Kotite really wanted a contract extension so that he didn’t have to go into 1995 on the last year of his deal; that’s a totally normal thing to want. He started the season off with a 7-2 record and tried to pressure Lurie into that extension by kind of insisting that he might look for other jobs.
Kotite went on to lose the next seven games, and Lurie fired him before the 1995 season. That means that once again, an Eagles head coach was fired two years into a three-year deal.
Andy Reid, 1999-2012:
Andy Reid was the cornerstone of the Eagles for a very long time, and in his 14 seasons with the Eagles, he had an amazing 140-102-1 record. That included nine seasons where he took the team to the playoffs, four consecutive seasons where he went to the NFC Championship game, and one Super Bowl appearance. He was great.
He signed his first contract extension (for six years) in 2001, his second extension (for four years) in 2004, and his third extension (for three years) in 2010.
He and the Eagles had a mutual parting of ways after the Eagles went 4-12 in the 2012 season … You guessed it, just one year short of completing his three-year (but actually 15-year) deal.
Doug Pederson, 2016-2020:
After the Eagles won their first Super Bowl in 2018, they decided to pick up a fifth-year option on Doug Pederson’s contract, which kept him with the team through the 2020 season. About three months later, he signed a contract extension through the 2022 season.
Essentially, he received a three-year extension on his initial four-year deal. That makes sense for a Super Bowl-winning head coach.
Then the catastrophe of the 2020 season happened. It looked like the Eagles would be bringing Pederson back, but after an end-of-season meeting, he and the organization decided that they had two entirely different ideas on how to get everything back on track.
After five years and a Super Bowl win, the Eagles and Dougie P. parted ways, after two years of his four-year extension.
Nick Sirianni, 2021-Present:
We don’t know the details of Nick Sirianni’s extension yet, and there's a decent chance that we won’t for a while; All we know is that it’s a “multi-year contract extension.” All we know is that a three-year extension has been a relative death sentence for Eagles coaches.
It makes a little bit of sense: whether it’s a player or a head coach, a team letting someone go into the last year of a contract means they’re probably not sticking around for too much longer. When it comes to coaches, it's better to pull the plug too early, rather than too late.
Again, look at the Giants: they don’t want to fire Brian Daboll because they’d rather look like a classy organization that doesn’t get rid of people, and not an organization that cares about winning … or being moderately competent and competitive.