NEW ORLEANS — The Philadelphia Eagles are not chasing a three-peat.
They didn’t make the Super Bowl last year and they lost to the Kansas City Chiefs the year before.
Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts has not hoisted a Lombardi Trophy and head coach Nick Sirianni has yet to celebrate with the confetti he most wants.
But the Eagles are, more quietly than the perennially-last-ones-standing Chiefs, creating their own dynasty. Because for the third time in eight years, they are representing the NFC on the biggest stage.
The common denominator in Philadelphia: general manager Howie Roseman.
Roseman has constructed three separate Super Bowl-appearing rosters with a rotating cast at head coach, quarterback, edge rusher and beyond. The carousel isn’t a goal. But in a league strapped by salary-cap restrictions and textured by aging players with a small window at their peak, the ability to pivot and transform rosters extends a franchise’s championship window.
Roseman has pivoted and innovated fearlessly — because his greatest “fear” already materialized. Fifteen years into Roseman’s Eagles stint and five into his general manager tenure, then-Eagles head coach Chip Kelly reassigned Roseman away from personnel responsibilities. He took it as a firing.
As he outlasted Kelly and reclaimed his post, he found clarity.
“When I came back, I was already kind of fired once, so I wasn’t really worried about losing my job anymore,” Roseman said Monday night at Super Bowl media night. “That gives you kind of a freedom to do things that you think are right without worrying about the ramifications or just trying to win 10 games and make the playoffs and everyone gets another year on their contract.
“You have to really trust your instincts, go in the direction of that and be kind of obsessive about it.”
During Roseman’s year away from football operations, he studied success. He visited basketball general managers and baseball general managers; soccer general managers and Fortune 500 CEOs, he said. He considered: What made each of them successful, and what common threads crossed league and industry boundaries?
“Conviction about the things that you believe in,” Roseman said. “All the people I spent time with who have won championships or built championship teams, they were very confident in the way they were going about it. And they didn’t deviate because someone said something different or it didn’t sound right.”
Decisions can be collaborative without bleeding into groupthink.
Roseman leans on his front office, coaching staff, players and team owner Jeffrey Lurie as he forges a path from Super Bowl contender to Super Bowl contender. Ultimately, he’s been the key decision-maker who drafted Hurts in the second round despite Carson Wentz’s starter role at the time. He was the one who didn’t consider a second-round pick on center Cam Jurgens wasteful just because All-Pro Jason Kelce would start through his career’s end. Philadelphia’s offensive line managed to continue its dominance in its first post-Kelce year this season.
Roseman took a chance on a career special teamer who became All-Pro linebacker Zack Baun, and he didn’t shy away from drafting a bundle of Georgia defenders when the draft board signaled its wisdom.
And Roseman didn’t let league trends on running backs deter him from chasing what he believed was a generational talent in free agency. Saquon Barkley’s debut Philadelphia regular season surpassed the elite 2,000-yard threshold. In the postseason, he has averaged 135 yards from scrimmage per game while collecting five touchdowns in three contests.
“Special player,” Roseman said of Barkley. “Sometimes the pendulum swings too much and it felt like it was swinging too much [where] skill guys and receivers and even tight end market was starting to come up and it just didn’t make sense that there was also great players at other positions who weren’t getting paid.
“Once free agency opened, we were really aggressive with him. It wasn’t like we were dating other people. We were trying to get him from the minute the clock struck 12.”
The decision won’t take Philadelphia to a chance at three-peating Sunday as the Chiefs could. But the trifecta of Roseman Super Bowl squads in the decade since his reassignment will tell their own story.
It’s a story he thought then he would not get the chance to tell.
“That whole year I wasn’t planning to come back with the Philadelphia Eagles, I was thinking that I was going to have to reinvent myself somewhere else,” Roseman said. “And I think that for me that’s always there, you know, I’m always trying to prove myself. I’m always trying to compete. I know that it doesn’t matter what I did last year or last week, that we’ve got to put together a team every year and compete with the best in the world. And I think that’s what drives me: knowing how quickly in this business you go from being really successful to getting your ass kicked.
“I wanted to do differently if I ever got a shot again.”
