PHILADELPHIA – Occasionally, the NFL’s obsession with offense can help an organization, and that sentiment is the silver lining for the Super Bowl LIX-winning Philadelphia Eagles.
The Eagles revealed their coaching staff adjustments Friday in advance of the league’s annual meetings, confirming pre-reported tweaks tied to the departure of Kellen Moore and some of his support staff to the New Orleans Saints.
Moore, the Eagles’ offensive coordinator for the 2024-25 season, was hired as the head coach of the Saints shortly after the Super Bowl. He took his long-time consigliere, quarterbacks coach Doug Nussmeier with him, as well as offensive assistant Kyle Valero, another Moore acolyte, and assistant offensive line coach T.J. Paganetti from Nick Sirianni’s staff.
Nussmeier got bumped up to OC in New Orleans while Valero was named Moore’s assistant wide receivers coach, and Paganetti got a run-game coordinator title.
The Eagles stayed in-house to elevate associate head coach/pass game coordinator Kevin Patullo to OC and went outside the organization to bolster the offensive support staff, officially rubber-stamping several previously reported hirings.
Those included Parks Frazier, who has a history with Sirianni and Patullo in Indianapolis, as passing game coordinator, former Bowling Green head coach Scott Loeffler as the new quarterbacks coach, Greg Austin returning as Jeff Stoutland’s assistant with the offensive line, former Notre Dame QB and Georgia assistant Montgomery VanGorder as a quality control assistant, and former Alabama-Birmingham executive director of football operations Cole Peterson as Sirianni’s personal assistant.
What didn’t need to change was Vic Fangio and his defensive staff, the architects of the No. 1 defense in the NFL that stymied a historic Kansas City Chiefs offense fueled by the greatest coach/QB combination of the modern generation.
There was one game in the entire 2024-25 NFL season in which a defense did not allow an opposing offense to cross the 50-yard line over the first nine possessions of a game, and that was Super Bowl LIX when Fangio’s defense completely shuddered the brilliance of Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes.
At this stage of his career, the well-regarded Fangio had confirmed multiple times he didn’t want to go anywhere else, but his lieutenants are all younger coaches with ambition.
Plenty of teams could have plucked away a Fangio assistant for a DC job, never mind a head-coaching opportunity.
Moore did interview rising secondary coach Christian Parker for his DC job before defaulting to his old boss with the LA Chargers, Brandon Staley.
Defensive line coach Clint Hurtt, a former DC in Seattle, edge-rushing coach Jeremiah Washburn, and linebackers coach Bobby King are back and all figure to be on the ground floor of getting younger players ready to take the next step.
For Parker, that means helping Kelee Ringo and Sydney Brown reach the next level on the heels of his tremendous success with 2024 rookies Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean. Hurtt needs to keep developing Moro Ojomo to help replace Milton Williams, and Washburn is tasked with making sure the trajectories of Nolan Smith and Jalyx Hunt keep pointing up.
Meanwhile, fresh off helping Zack Baun go from a one-year, prove-it deal to first-team All-Pro at LB, King needs to have Jeremiah Trotter Jr. in the position to serve in an Oren Burks-like role.
The Eagles organization believes in its current plan due to the developmental capabilities on the defensive side of the football, and the biggest part of that is tied to a coaching staff that went untouched even after one of the greatest Super Bowl performances in history.
