Andy Reid still hates the run, A.J. Brown and Jason Kelce should ignore the trolls, and other Eagles thoughts

First and final (well, not quite) thoughts on the 2024-25 Eagles and Super Bowl LIX …

For any Eagles fan who remembers Andy Reid’s 14-year tenure in Philadelphia, his play-calling in last week’s Super Bowl had to inspire two feelings: delight and déjà vu. Big Red greased the skids for the Eagles’ 40-22 rout by doing what he had done frequently when he was here. He seemed to forget that it is legal in professional football to have a quarterback take a snap, turn around, and hand the ball to a running back.

Twelve of Kansas City’s first 13 plays were designed passes. Even though they trailed by just 10 points midway through the second quarter, the Chiefs acted as if they had spotted the Eagles a three-touchdown lead before kickoff. It wasn’t until seven minutes before halftime, when Cooper DeJean intercepted Patrick Mahomes’ ill-advised throw for DeAndre Hopkins and weaved his way to that 38-yard touchdown, that the Eagles broke things open. A 10-point deficit that early in a game is not insurmountable. It wasn’t a situation in which any coach, even Reid, should have been thinking, We’re losing by so much so late in the game that we have to throw the ball on every down. Reid, as he has tended to do, abandoned the run.

So why didn’t he use Isiah Pacheco and Kareem Hunt more, if for no other reason than to keep the Eagles’ defense honest? Whenever someone asks a variation of this question about Reid — Why didn’t he give the ball more to Duce Staley or Brian Westbrook or [INSERT NAME OF EXCELLENT TAILBACK HERE]? — the theories or explanations often strip Reid of his coaching agency. Andy’s addicted to the pass. Andy freezes up in big moments. Andy’s just dumb. But there is a guiding philosophy behind Reid’s reliance on throwing the ball, and one of his closest friends and longtime lieutenants, Marty Mornhinweg, once explained it.

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In the summer of 2013, just before the first of his two seasons as the New York Jets’ offensive coordinator, Mornhinweg sat at his office desk inside the Jets’ headquarters in Florham Park, N.J. On the wall behind his desk were shelves of binders, each of which contained notes and formations and statistical analyses from each stop in his coaching career: the Green Bay Packers, the San Francisco 49ers, the Detroit Lions, his 10 seasons with Reid and the Eagles. The two of them, of course, were branches on the Bill Walsh-Mike Holmgren coaching tree.

I asked Mornhinweg about his and Reid’s tendency, as play-callers, to have their run-pass ratio tilt heavily toward the pass. He swiveled around in his desk and grabbed one of the binders off a shelf. What he said next made me think of a jump shooter who had missed several three-pointers in a row but was certain the next one was going in.

“Depends upon the players you have,” Mornhinweg said. “Brett Favre — give him enough opportunities. Donovan McNabb — give the man enough opportunities, and he’s going to get it done for you. Now, a couple of them might not look real pretty, though Favre looked just beautiful for about five years there, man alive. But I have coached a couple of quarterbacks where the mentality for me was, ‘Make sure when we came out of this game that we gave him enough opportunities.’

“Now there have been others where you have to be much more … let’s say … to win ballgames, and win big ballgames, you have to be much more consistent — [Jeff] Garcia. I really did think we had to be much more consistent with Jeff, and our big plays may go down but our consistency would go up. Donovan is a big-play guy. Favre and McNabb, they’re built that way, absolutely built that way. Steve Young — I wanted the ball in his hands.”

It’s safe to say that Reid views Mahomes in the same way, that he wanted the ball in Mahomes’ hands as much as possible, that he believed it was the best and maybe only strategy that gave the Chiefs a shot at keeping up with and beating the Eagles. It failed. The Chiefs couldn’t block the Eagles’ defensive line, and Mahomes was so rattled that he played one of the worst games of his career, all of which suggests that the two-time defending champs never really had a chance.

On his podcast, Jason Kelce felt the need to explain why he was torn about the matchup and outcome of the Super Bowl: His former team beat his brother’s team. During his speech Friday at the Eagles’ parade, A.J. Brown felt the need to call out anyone who thought he was selfish and too concerned with his own statistics and personal achievements.

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Here’s a piece of advice, guys: While it’s understandable that you would want to defend yourselves, most of the people disparaging you were (often anonymous) posters on X/Twitter and Instagram, and responding to those kinds of critics isn’t worth it. If you spend any time in the public eye, you’ll only cause yourself a lot of unnecessary stress by getting angry and defensive over every irrelevant troll on social media. Let it go. The crazy and unreasonable, you will always have with you.

A small post-Super Bowl scene to remember:

In the Superdome locker room after the game, Jake Elliott wore aviator sunglasses and a baseball cap backward and puffed on a cigar that was as big as his right leg. C.J. Gardner-Johnson strutted and sang. Jeffrey Lurie and Howie Roseman danced with the players. Dozens of media members held up their smartphones to record the party.

And Nick Sirianni — who was once the laughingstock of the NFL for his awkward introductory press conference, who has taunted opposing fans and jawed with Eagles fans, whose sideline histrionics and camera-mugging rubbed so many around the league the wrong way — stayed in a nearby office, talking one by one to reporters and Eagles staff members, seeking little to no attention.

Dom DiSandro, the team’s chief security officer, stuck his head in the office.

“Coach,” he said, “you want to talk to the team at all?”

Sirianni shook his head.

“I don’t need to.”