By Andrew Smith, Sports Talk Philly Contributing Writer
Philadelphia, you can rest easy now. The outside voice we have been craving has entered the chat.
Let’s start with the Press Taylor promotion. Although he is not going to be the offensive coordinator, promoting Taylor seemed like an inevitable chain of events. Taylor has been with the Eagles since 2013, and was one of only a handful of coaches Doug Pederson kept around whenever he took over Chip Kelly’s monstrosity. Obviously, Doug sees something in Taylor to keep him around this long and to keep promoting him. Whatever those reasons are remain unknown, but only time will tell.
This announcement was made about half an hour before the other additions to the coaching staff were announced, so naturally, Eagles Twitter was ready to burn everything to the ground. But with the two new additions to the staff, there might be some hope for a new and rejuvenated offense.
If you live under a rock and haven’t heard yet, Rich Scangarello and Andrew Breiner are the outside voices I eluded to that will be joining the Eagles offensive coaching staff. With official titles not being announced for both guys, bringing in as many new and different ideas needed to be the main objective of anyone new joining the staff; that’s what we are going to get with both guys.
Scangarello was most recently the offensive coordinator for the Denver Broncos, and was under Kyle Shanahan’s offense both in San Francisco and Atlanta.
As the quarterbacks coach in San Francisco, he was glued to Jimmy Garappolo when he came to the Niners in late 2017, and is a big part of making Jimmy successful in the later months of his first season there.
As the offensive coordinator of the Broncos last year, he had decent success with washed up Joe Flacco, but once Drew Lock got healthy enough to play and took the starting role with five games left to go in the season, their offense was explosive. His firing after one season is baffling to me. A staple of his offense is all the motions and bootlegs he runs, and we all know how Wentz performs outside of the pocket. Noted QB guy. Inject it into my veins.
Andrew Breiner is a way lower profile addition, but another talented quarterback coach. He has been a quarterbacks coach since 2008, most notably being the quarterback coach for the past three years at Mississippi State under Joe Mooreead, now the offensive coordinator at Oregon. Moorhead was an offensive coordinator target for the Eagles, so getting one of his disciples is an intriguing addition to the staff.
As more news about the Eagle’s coaching staff continues to break, it seems like we finally have a strategy and plan moving forward: coaching and scheming by committee.
Honestly, this is what is needed with this coaching staff, and I think it will only benefit the birds going forward. Bring in as many guys as we can from different backgrounds that all have different ideas, hopefully only to help form the best game plan that fits Carson Wentz’s strengths as well as those of the offense that is around him. It’s going to come down to what Doug wants and if Doug actually listens and gives all these new cats an opportunity to help create new game plans. Only time will tell, but this is an exciting start to hopefully a more prosperous offense in the future.