The biggest rats in recent Eagles history, from Jonathan Gannon to the Jalen Hurts source

No one likes a rat. These pseudo-weasels do whatever they can to better themselves and take down everyone and everything around them. In football, these rats are thinking about themselves and not the team. 

We’re in the golden age of Philadelphia Eagles football, and there are a whole lot of them slinking around, not just in the corners, but also making incredibly important decisions. It’s garbage behavior, and it deserves to be called out and shamed. Let’s start with one that’s a little different than the others.

Orlando Scandrick, 2019

Remember that 2019 season when Orlando Scandrick got cut after the Week 7 loss to the Cowboys? He went on FS1’s Undisputed and started trashing the team. 

He said Malcolm Jenkins, the outspoken leader of the 2017 Super Bowl-winning team and Eagles’ Hall of Famer, was the problem on the defense as a leader, a player, and a person. He was talking about how he doesn’t trust anything that Howie Roseman says. And he said that the success from the 2017 season was rotting the locker room and causing a lack of accountability. 

But Scandrick? Nah, he wasn't the problem; it was everyone else. Grade A rat mentality from the guy … but that’s the kind of stuff that you say when you want to cozy up next to Skip Bayless and be a regular on his TV show. 

Matt Patricia, 2023

There’s a running theory that guys from the Belichick coaching tree go around to other teams and sabotage them. It’s either that, or they are all just incredibly bad at their jobs on an NFL level.

Bill O’Brien went to the Texans, became their head coach/general manager, and traded De’Andre Hopkins for David Johnson. Brian Flores went to Miami and got the team in trouble for tanking. Josh McDaniels went to the Rams, Broncos, and Raiders and turned them all into laughingstocks… Joe Judge, Eric Mangini, the list goes on, and the results are all the same. 

Matt Patricia was the Patriots’ defensive coordinator in 2017. That means he was there when Nick Foles and the Eagles offense decimated the New England defense and wasted Tom Brady’s best championship performance.

After he got hired and fired by the Lions, he went back and spent a couple of seasons with Belichick in 2021 and 2022. For some reason, the Eagles hired him as a senior defensive assistant in 2023. 

In Weeks 13 and 14 of that season, the collapse started; Sean DeSai’s defense allowed the 49ers to score 42 points and the Cowboys to score 33 points. Before the Week 15 game, Nick Sirianni said that Patricia was going to take over as the defensive play caller… It was a soft firing for DeSai and a soft hiring for Patricia. 

In the next five games, Patricia’s defense allowed 27.8 points per game, and the team would go 1-4 while getting mercy killed by the Buccaneers in the Wild Card round of the playoffs. 

Nothing about the situation made sense. DeSai’s defense was bad, but it wasn’t terrible, and practically changing the defensive coordinator in December is one of the worst things you could do as a team with championship aspirations. 

Patricia’s defense wasn’t bad; it was terrible. Everything looked like hell: guys were running into each other, Haason Reddick wasn’t allowed to go after the quarterback, no one could cover, and no one could tackle. It was the worst defense in the NFL.

I refuse to believe that Patricia wasn’t still mad about the 2017 season. I refuse to believe that he wasn’t in Sirianni’s ear, poisoning his brain, and trying to Littlefinger his way into the DC position purely so he can run the team into the ground. That’s rat behavior. 

Kevin Patullo, 2025

That 2023 season is going to be remembered for the historical collapse. The 2025 season, on the other hand, is going to be remembered for the Eagles not capitalizing.

They went 11-6 and lost in the first round of the playoffs in both seasons… But in 2025, they were the defending Super Bowl Champions, and the NFL as a whole was not having a great season. 

The door was wide open for them to be able to run it back, and everything was going the right way for the team… except for the offense. There were probably a whole bunch of reasons for that, but at a macro level, the offense never looked coordinated. 

That falls on Kevin Patullo, whose job as an offensive coordinator is to coordinate the offense.

Now, being bad at your job doesn’t make you a rat. Tons of people are bad at what they do, and they’re totally chill about it. The thing with Patullo is that it really looks like he’s nowhere close to being chill, thus, even more rat-like.

None of this is confirmed because reporters frustratingly keep their sources anonymous, but a couple of weeks ago, ESPN put out a hit piece on Jalen Hurts that was disguised as a piece about the frustrations with the Eagles' offense. Tim McManus and Jeremy Fowler (the guys who wrote it) said that they had a dozen sources that they talked to for the piece. 

The underlying theme was nothing new: Jalen Hurts is a commanding quarterback and has preferences on what plays the offense runs… but it went weirdly deeper and more specific than that.

There was one specific part that really seemed like the source was Patullo. It was all about that last play call of the season: the Four Verts call on fourth down.

“As one team source recalled, Hurts was the one who recommended four verts. A separate source with knowledge of the situation says that though the Eagles' quarterback did suggest it, he was simply responding to a question about his preferences.”

Okay, per one source, Hurts said, ‘Let’s do this really terrible and basic play.’ Per a different source, Hurts said, ‘You really want to do this terrible and basic play?’ I wonder which guy the first source was?

We’ll never know who really said what, but it seems really unlikely that the quarterback whose reason for living is to win football games would recommend such a donkey-brained play. OR, even if he did, it’s on the coaching staff to coach him and make a different decision. 

This whole thing stinks, and the smell is coming from Patullo’s trash can. 

Jonathan Gannon, 2022

The beautiful thing about the NFL and the postseason is that there are no series. It’s just a single win-or-die game. That means that teams go into those games as prepared as possible… Or at least that’s what they should do. 

In 2022, when the Eagles made it to the Super Bowl, Jonathan Gannon decided to focus more on his new job with the Arizona Cardinals … A job that he was illegally interviewing for… rather than thinking about game planning for Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes. 

In the second half, Mahomes was 13-of-14 for 93 yards and two touchdowns (they were both the same playcall), and had two scrambles for 40 yards. The Chiefs never punted and came back from being down 24-12 and won 38-35. 

Two days after the loss, Gannon accepted the job as the Cardinals’ new head coach, which was weird because it was never really reported that he had an interview with the team. 

Turns out, he did that interview the week that the Eagles won the NFC Championship game, which you can’t do. There ended up being a draft-related punishment for the Cardinals, but it didn’t come close to being restitution for losing a Super Bowl.

It wasn’t just the 2022 season that Gannon’s rat-hearted nature messed up. Teams that make it to the Super Bowl have to anticipate that their coaching staff is going to get raided; it’s just what happens. 

The timing of that happening is inherently bad because all of the other teams in the NFL can start hiring their new coaching staff, so the earlier teams learn about their guys leaving, the better. 

The Eagles seemed to have had an inkling that Gannon was going to go somewhere because they signed Vic Fangio to a two-week contract to be an offensive consultant going into the Super Bowl. 

They had him in the building, so the second that Gannon moved on, they would hire Fangio to the job he was born to do …

The Super Bowl was on Feb. 12. On Feb. 13, Gannon was still with the Eagles, so Fangio accepted the DC job in Miami. On Feb. 14, Gannon left, the Eagles were high and dry, and had to hire Sean DeSai.

To add one final section to Gannon’s rap sheet: He also takes credit for Nick Sirianni giving the play-calling duties to Shane Steichen in 2021. Maybe that happened … but it definitely didn’t.

Illegally interviewing for a job, ignoring your current job's duties at the most important time, taking a new job, leaving your team in a really bad spot when they had plans in place, and taking credit for stuff that has nothing to do with you: that’s a rat. 

Chip Kelly, 2015:

First and foremost: Chip Kelly being a rat eventually led to the Eagles winning their first Super Bowl. 

He got hired as the Eagles’ head coach in 2013 and led the team to two-straight 10-6 seasons. In 2015, Kelly convinced Jeffrey Lurie that he should have control of the roster, not Howie Roseman. 

Howie got moved to a moldy office underneath a stairwell that he had to share with some Shelob-sized spiders, while Kelly tore everything to the ground and rebuilt it with popsicle sticks. 

He traded Shady McCoy to the Bills for Kiko Alonso. He traded Nick Foles to the Rams for Sam Bradford. He didn’t pay Jeremy Maclin. He did pay DeMarco Murray. He signed Miles Austin. He signed Byron Maxwell. And he made DeSean Jackson leave (but that was after the 2013 season).

Did all of those moves work? No. Of course they didn’t. Kelly’s super fast-paced offense hit the skids, and the team went 6-9 before he got fired going into Week 17.

The guy weaseled himself into the heart of the team and then made every terrible move that he could make. However, Howie used that time like a year in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber.

“Two years ago, when they made a decision, he came out of there a different man. He came out of there with the purpose and the drive to make this possible. And I saw a different Howie Roseman. An underdog.” -Jason Kelce

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