Report: Eagles shake up medical staff for third straight offseason

The Philadelphia Eagles are shaking up their medical staff for the third straight offseason.

The team will not be renewing expired contracts held by director of high performance Shaun Huls and director of rehabilitation Shireen Mansoori, according to a report from the Inquirer’s Jeff McLane.

Huls originally joined the Eagles when Chip Kelly was first hired in 2013 while Mansoori was added less than two years ago.

Les Bowen notes that even more changes could be on the way:

The Eagles originally started making significant changes to their medical staff during the 2018 offseason. The Eagles were coming off a Super Bowl win, yes, but they had to overcome an excess of injuries to get there. The team saw director of sports medicine and head athletic trainer Chris Peduzzi “step down” after spending 19 years in Philly. Head team physician Peter DeLuca and team internist Gary Dorshimer also weren’t retained despite each spending nearly two decades with the Eagles.

After another injury-plagued season in 2018, the Eagles made more changes during the 2019 offseason. The Eagles parted ways with head team physician and head internist Stephen A. Stache after just one year. The Eagles also added Arsh Dhanota as their chief medical officer.

Injuries continued to be an issue for the Eagles in 2019 and executive vice president/general manager Howie Roseman noted as much in his postmortem press conference. Here’s what he said last month in January:

“I think the last part is that we need to look at everything. We’ve started that process during the season. As a front office, we have the ability to do that while the coaches are preparing for games. One of the things that obviously has been an issue for us has been the injury situation. When we look at the last three years, in 2017, we were able to overcome it. The last two years, the injuries have really hurt our football team.

There is a part of that that is natural during the game. Injuries are going to happen. But we have to figure out a way to get better here. We can help from a front office perspective by looking at the players that we bring in. Hope is not a strategy when it comes to injuries. When you bring in guys that are injured, it obviously increases the risk that they will get hurt again.

We have hired a new chief medical officer [Arsh Dhanota]. This is someone that we are very, very excited to have. He came in in June and what he asked for us was that he would observe, observe through the season, observe our training staff, observe our weight staff, our sports science, our processes, and make recommendations to us that we would carry out. So we’re excited about that.”

So, it sounds like the Eagles are counting on Dhanota to suggest much-needed changes after taking a season to study the team’s operation. Adjustments to the medical staff could be just the beginning.

It’s easy to believe changes are needed given all the issues the Eagles have had with injury and re-injury over the past few seasons. Not to mention all the former players who’ve ripped the way the team handles injuries.

One can only hope the Eagles get it right this time around.