Brett Favre has been around the NFL for a long time, but even he was surprised to hear that his former teammate and longtime friend Doug Pederson was fired by the Eagles on Monday.
Favre hasn’t talked to Pederson since the news broke, but he thinks he knows what happened.
“To me, basically it says that they chose Carson (Wentz) over Doug,” Favre said on SiriusXM. “And that’s OK. Jeffrey Lurie owns the team, he can do what he wants.
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“But I mean, we’re not that far removed from their first Super Bowl title ever. Ever. How quickly you forget, you know? Look, the record the last few years since the Super Bowl win, has been not up to par but you can point to a lot of things that have contributed to that. But, I mean, you don’t win a Super Bowl by being a bad coach. I’m sorry, you just don’t.”
Favre seemed a little annoyed that his buddy lost his job just three years after winning the first Super Bowl in Eagles history. That’s fair.
Lurie on Monday even admitted that Pederson didn’t deserve to get fired, but he made the decision based on what was best for the organization going forward. It was clear, Lurie said, that Pederson’s plan for the future did not align with the organization’s plan and a lot of that had to do with his preferred coaching staff.
But there’s probably some truth to the Pederson-Wentz angle. It’s one that Troy Aikman brought up this week too, saying he thought Pederson preferred Jalen Hurts. After all, we had heard for a couple weeks about the deteriorating and irreparable relationship between the head coach and “franchise” quarterback.
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For what it’s worth, Lurie on Monday tried to dispel the notion that Wentz’s performance or his relationship with Pederson was the catalyst to the decision to fire Pederson.
“This kind of decision has probably multiple, multiple variables, but it's not based on a quarterback or a particular position group,” Lurie said. “Certainly, you have to look at the regression of our offense. … I look more at the whole picture. It's not about a particular player or a particular group, and that's true for going forward.”
And Lurie didn’t really speak of Wentz glowingly throughout Monday’s press conference. In fact, he referred to Wentz as an “asset” on two separate occasions. In fact, he called both quarterbacks — Wentz and Hurts — assets.
So maybe the Pederson-Wentz dynamic played a role but the quarterback position for the future seems up in the air.
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