Former GM Mike Lombardi: Eagles’ Doug Pederson, ‘Isn’t a Head Coach’

Former NFL GM Mike Lombardi, now working for the website The Ringer, thinks Philadelphia Eagles coach Doug Pederson is in over his head.

“Now, everybody knows Pederson isn’t a head coach,” Lombardi said on The Ringer’s podcast. “He might be less qualified to coach a team than anyone I’ve seen in my 30-plus years in the NFL. Pederson was barely a coordinator before he became a head coach!”

Lombardi, the former Cleveland Browns GM, who was also a personnel executive with San Francisco, New England and Oakland, ruffled a lot of feathers in Philly with this comment. Eagles fans have high expectations for their team this year.

“A lot of Eagles fans, they take it personally,” Lombardi said Tuesday on CSN’s Philly Sports Talk. “Look, they have great pride in their team, I understand it.

“The things that you look for in a coach are [do] mistakes get better, does the team improve — records are meaningless. I mean, Bill Walsh wrote a book called ‘The Score Takes Care of Itself.’ He’s right, you don’t need to look at the score, you watch the games, how they’re managed, how they’re handled within close point, and you see how it comes.

“The Eagles were 26th in the National Football League in first-quarter points (in 2016). That means your game plan that you started out with isn’t really working. And then when you break down the season, and you go through the first eight games and then you look at the second eight games, everything they did offensively got worse — everything. It went down hill.”

The bottom line is Lombardi just doesn’t think Pederson, now entering his second year in Philadelphia, is head coaching material.

“I just voiced an opinion — it’s not a hot take by no means,” Lombardi told CSN. “I’ve studied the Eagles, I’ve studied the NFL for 35 years, I’ve been to four Super Bowls, I’ve won three. I’ve been around Bill Walsh, I’ve been around Bill Belichick, I’ve been around Al Davis — I think I know what a good coach looks like. I just don’t see Doug being able to be ready for the job that they [have] given him, and I think that’s the challenge.

“My point is this, Doug applied for the job, he was [three] years in Kansas City as the offensive coordinator, but he’s not because Andy (Reid) called the plays.I think the NFL is a challenging place to learn on-the-job training. That’s my point. I think it’s not a friendly league, and I think when you look at the close games and you look at the record down the stretch — I’ve been around some really good coaches, and I just don’t see that coming out. The symptoms that I see don’t register in terms of being a great coach.”

What does Pederson think of Lombardi’s critique of him?

“Listen, I’m confident in what I do,” Pederson said on Monday. “He’s not in the building. I coach our coaches and coach our players. And I think if you ask any one of our players or our assistant coaches, I think they would maybe say something a little different. I have not read the article so I can’t respond to it.”

The Eagles have a loaded roster. They have the requisite talent to have a good season. We will see if their coach holds them back, as Lombardi thinks he might.