Is Kevin Patullo going to be the next Brian Johnson or Kellen Moore?

During Super Bowl week, it was pretty much understood that Kellen Moore was going to leave the Philadelphia Eagles and take the head coaching job in New Orleans. The question was: if the Eagles win, will that mean Nick Sirianni gets to choose his next offensive coordinator? It looks like the answer to that question was probably a resounding ‘yes.’

The Eagles promoted their passing game coordinator, Kevin Patullo, to offensive coordinator. He’s a familiar face in the building, but recent history has shown that familiar faces don’t necessarily mean success. 

Will a familiar face mean familiar problems?

Shane Steichen was the Eagles offensive coordinator in 2022, and after the season, he took the head coaching job in Indianapolis. Brian Johnson, who was the quarterbacks coach for the previous two years, was promoted to OC. 

The thought there was that if the Eagles didn’t promote him, he would’ve been hired to be an offensive coordinator somewhere else. It was a genuinely good thought and plan, but the offense was boring and unproductive, and no one knew if that was Nick Sirianni’s fault or Johnson’s. Regardless, everything went horribly, and Johnson was fired after the 2023 season. 

In 2024, Kellen Moore was hired to be the offensive coordinator, Sirianni was forced into a new role as a CEO head coach, everything worked out perfectly, and now we’re here: Nick Sirianni’s guy, Kevin Patullo is the Eagles' new offensive coordinator.

Sirianni and Patullo have been on the same coaching staff since 2018 with the Colts. At that time, Sirianni was the offensive coordinator, and Patullo was the wide receivers coach until 2020, when Patullo was promoted to pass game specialist.  When they both moved to Philadelphia, Sirianni became the head coach and gave Patullo the pass game coordinator job. In 2023, Patullo became the pass game coordinator and the associate head coach. 

So the main points here are that Patullo knows this team inside and out, has developed a passing game that can work (even though it looks dumb a lot of the time), and he’s never called plays before. 

The lack of play-calling experience is one of the bigger things to focus on because that’s relatively similar to Brian Johnson in 2023. 

That season was not Johnson’s first time calling plays, but it was his first time doing it in the NFL. A lot goes into play-calling from a processing standpoint—both in the coach’s head and in how he communicates it. At this point, it’s a wait-and-see kind of thing for that. 

Regardless, it’s going to be another new voice in Jalen Hurts’ ear in 2025, which is going to be a big talking point over the next six months.

Continuity is a major factor here because Jalen Hurts will have a different offensive coordinator for four of his five seasons as a starter in the NFL, and in the one season where he had the same offensive coordinator for two years, he played at an extremely high level.

Now, that might be more of a correlation thing than a causation thing. In 2022, the offense was a rocket ship because it was hitting big plays and efficient gains at an unprecedented clip due to A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, and Jalen Hurts’ emergence as a star. 

Then, with a new OC in 2023, the wheels fell off big time, but that could be linked back to Nick Sirianni’s involvement with the offense and/or unimaginative scheming and play calling.

For the vast majority of the 2024 season, Jalen was never tested in the passing game because the running game was so dominant… but when he needed to throw the ball, he did it at a pretty high level. 

So, did Jalen do well in 2022 because of the same OC and bad in 2023 because of a new OC? Maybe, but then it’s hard to explain his success in 2024 using that same logic.

One thing that can make it easier is the actual language used in calling plays, and luckily, it sounds like Patullo isn’t expected to change the terminology from what Moore did last season.

In one of Kellen Moore’s first press conferences last offseason, he was asked about the terminology that was going to be used, and he said, “...If everyone understands a play and it makes sense, let’s keep things in place. It’s not that complicated. We’re continuing to evolve the system to make sure that the language ties together, and the communication can be clean…”

He went on to talk about the importance of players being able to play fast. That was a little bit of an issue at the start of last season until Lane Johnson said that the team made a conscious effort to practice getting to the ball quickly and getting the snap off before the play clock reached zero. That ended up helping the offense out a whole lot. 

If Patullo is going to come into this season with the thought that he can keep some of the processes the same as the 2024 season, that level of continuity is a good thing.

Another big thing about this whole situation is how much Sirianni is actually going to be involved, and unfortunately, we’ll probably never get a comforting answer.

On one hand, if Sirianni wants to be involved in the offense more than he was last season, he’s earned it… it’d be a bad idea to mix his recipe for success, but if he wants to, then far be it from anyone to tell a Super Bowl-winning head coach (aside from Howie Roseman and Jeffrey Lurie) how to run his team.

On the other hand, Patullo is a guy that Sirianni trusts. Hopefully, he trusts him to a point where he can stay as detached as he was last season. That is a proven winning recipe.

It would make a whole lot of sense that Jalen Hurts got some say in who his new offensive coordinator is as well because if you win the Super Bowl, you get some say in who talks to you during the game. If the Eagles promoted Brian Johnson in 2023 simply because they didn’t want to lose him, Hurts probably didn’t have much of a say in it. Now, QB1 has earned his voice.

If the Super Bowl MVP — who has more emotional control than anyone outside the Shaolin Temple — signs off on an offensive coordinator, that’s a good sign Patullo will be the right guy. This will be a fun thing to have to deal with again once Kevin Patullo gets hired to be a head coach in two years.