PHILADELPHIA – After failing to land their preferred candidates, the GPS on the Eagles’ offensive coordinator search has taken a few detours.
Perhaps the most surprising one was the re-routing toward Chicago offensive coordinator Declan Doyle.
At just 29 with no previous play-calling experience, Doyle should be antithetical to everything Philadelphia signaled it was looking for in the wake of the Kevin Patullo experiment falling flat.
Is Continuity Overblown?
Dec 8, 2025; Inglewood, California, USA; Philadelphia Eagles general manager Howie Roseman looks on before the game against the Los Angeles Chargers at SoFi Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images | Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
Already, the Eagles have overcome one hurdle by getting the Bears to grant permission to talk with Doyle, something Chicago didn’t have to do for what the NFL considers a lateral move.
With no real path to play-calling with the Bears due to the presence of Ben Johnson, moving to Philadelphia to handle that would be a step up for Doyle, even with the pitfalls that accompany a meat-grinder of a market like Philadelphia.
Chicago is no picnic either of course and the upside for Doyle with the Eagles’ job is enormous with one successful season offering the EZ-Pass lane to a head-coaching job at 30.
The idea of continuity through a revolving door of play-callers during the Jalen Hurts era has been a staple of sports talk in Philadelphia, but if you lack patience to begin with, why would shelf life ever enter the conversation?
When the Eagles have had the opportunity to show tolerance or restraint through the growing pains of inexperienced play-callers like Patullo and Brian Johnson, they’ve declined that option.
So if you really think Doyle is some kind of play-calling prodigy born through the osmosis of Johnson’s brilliance, why not pull the trigger over the higher floor from the pedestrian nature of the recycled (Matt Nagy, Mike Kafka, Bobby Slowik etc.)?
Fortune favors the bold, not the passiveness of groupthink.
And failure comes with a reboot in 12 months anyway.
Either way, GM Howie Roseman is on record downplaying the idea of continuity.
“As much as you’d like to have continuity and would like to have guys here for a long period of time, we want to win,” Roseman said. “We have an urgency to win right now. If that comes with the ramifications that we lose good people because they’ve earned head coaching jobs, we’ll live with that.”
If the Eagles truly have that urgency, swinging for the fences on the future head coach sure seems better than settling for good enough to stick around for two years.
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