Eagles coaching staff won the Super Bowl, apparently aren’t as good as others

Brad Gagnon of Bleacher Report asks:

Can any coaching staff measure up to Bill Belichick and the vaunted New England Patriots?

*raises hand* Yeah, the staff that beat them in the Super Bowl with a backup QB.

Alright let’s see what it says about the Eagles.

3. Philadelphia Eagles

3rd? Third?

While he’ll miss departed offensive coordinator Frank Reich and quarterbacks coach John DeFilippo, Pederson is the brain behind the offense in Philadelphia. And that was the third-highest-scoring unit in football in 2017 as Pederson won the Super Bowl in his second season as a head coach.

All of these things are true. Reich and DeFilippo were really good assistants, but ultimately the offense was Pederson’s. The collaboration and aggressiveness that is the trademark of Pederson’s offense will remain.

Head Coach Ranking ranked him as the second-best game-planner and the second-best clock manager in the NFL, which is impressive considering the last team he head-coached before 2016 was a Louisiana high school squad in 2008.

Game planning and clock management are pretty big parts of coaching, so those are arguments that he’s ranked a too low. The comment on his high school coaching days reads like a pot shot. In retrospect, Pederson taking a school that hadn’t existed two years prior to his arrival and leading them to back-to-back state semi-finals hinted at greatness.

His top assistant is Schwartz, who somehow didn’t get hired as a head coach in the offseason after his celebrated defensive scheme played a huge role in Philly’s Super Bowl run. Schwartz is widely considered one of the top defensive minds in the game, and the numbers have reflected that the last few years (the Bills also ranked fourth in football defensively during his outgoing 2014 season there).

Jury’s still out on Groh, but the Pederson-Schwartz duo is one of the best in the league, and the two coaches appear to have many years ahead of them.

The offensive mind who won a Super Bowl and the defensive mind who won a Super Bowl remain and look like they will for years, but this isn’t the top coaching staff? Okay.

So who ranks above them?

2. Los Angeles Rams

McVay won the Coach of the Year award as the youngest head coach in NFL history in 2017. Enough said, right? The guy crushed it at Head Coach Ranking when it came to in-game adjustments, game-planning, utilizing personnel and play-calling, which explains why the Rams had the highest-scoring offense in football.

Head Coach Ranking is the PFF of coaches.

I would like to remind the author that when these two teams played each other, Pederson lost his MVP candidate QB during the game and beat McVay and the Rams 43-35. I’d say that’s a pretty damn good job of making in-game adjustments, game-planning, utilizing personnel, and play-calling.

1. New England Patriots

But this is mainly about Belichick, who has won more games in the playoffs (28) than half of the coaches on this list have won in the regular season. Unsurprisingly, he crushes the field in practically every metric at Head Coach Ranking.

So mainly because of the man on top, the smallest coaching staff in professional football is also the best.

Just last week I said that putting Bill Belichick ahead of Doug Pederson is fair, as Belichick’s long run at the top is incredible, so I can’t really argue with putting him above Pederson. But I would also like to point out this:

Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports

H/T The Falcoholic