Each day this week NBC Sports Philadelphia’s Reuben Frank will have an Eagles all-time top-10 list. On Monday, we rated quarterbacks, Tuesday was running backs, Wednesday wide receivers and Thursday defensive players. Today we rank the 10 best head coaches in Eagles history.
The challenge with most of these lists was narrowing it down to 10 guys. This list, the challenge was finding 10 guys who deserved to be included.
Think about the history of Eagles head coaches. Only six have won 30 games. Only eight have won a playoff game. Only four have won playoff games in more than one season.
Here's our top 10 ... and they're definitely not all legends.
10. Rich Kotite: Honestly, it kills me to even put Richie the K. on this list because he was a terrible coach and the only success he had was because of all the talent he inherited when he replaced Buddy Ryan before the 1991 season. Imagine being a rookie head coach and showing up for work on Day 1 and finding Reggie White, Seth Joyner, Eric Allen, Clyde Simmons, Byron Evans, Jerome Brown, Ben Smith, William Thomas, Wes Hopkins, Andre Waters, Randall Cunningham, Fred Barnett and Keith Byars in your locker room? How could you not win some games. Kotite’s first two teams went 10-6 and 11-5, with the 1992 bunch beating the Saints in a wild-card game at the Superdome. And his .563 winning percentage with the Eagles is 3rd-highest in franchise history among those who coached at least 50 games (behind Greasy Neale and Andy Reid). But when the Buddy guys had left and his guys had to play – in 1993 and 1994 – the Eagles went 10-22. Factor in the 0-7 finish in 1994 and his 3-13 and 1-15 seasons with the Jets and Kotite was 4-35 in the last 39 games he coached. But Kotite’s 36 wins are somehow 6th-most in franchise history and he’s one of only eight Eagles coaches to win a playoff game. It came down to Kotite or Chip Kelly for the last spot, and I couldn’t bring myself to go Chip.
9: Ray Rhodes: Like Kotite, Rhodes began his Eagles coaching career with a couple winning seasons and a playoff win. He was the only coach in Eagles history to reach the playoffs in each of his first two seasons until Nick Sirianni did it. But things quickly fell apart. His first two teams were both 10-6, and the 1995 team won that unforgettable 58-37 wild-card game against the Lions at the Vet (thank you, Lomas Brown). But when things went bad, they really went bad. Rhodes’ last two teams went 6-9-1 and 3-13, and that was that. His final 29-34-1 record is 3rd-worst among Eagles coaches with 50 games coached, ahead of only Bert Bell and Mike McCormick.
8. Jim Trimble: The only coach in franchise history to begin his coaching career with three straight winning seasons. The Eagles went 7-5 in 1952 and 7-4-1 in both 1953 and 1954. But when the 1955 team finished 4-7-1, Trimble got fired. They wouldn’t have three straight winning seasons again for a quarter of a century. Trimble’s .556 winning percentage is 5th-highest in franchise history, behind Sirianni [.676], Greasy Neale [.594], Reid [.583] and Kotite [.563].
7. Buddy Ryan: It’s hard to argue with 7-5 in 1987 (in non-strike games), then 10-6, 11-5 and 10-6 from 1988 through 1990 with three straight postseason appearances. During that four-year span, the Eagles’ 38-22 non-strike record was 4th-best in the league. The problem is Buddy’s 0-3 postseason record. The Eagles were outscored by a combined 61-25 in postseason losses to the Bears, Rams and Washington Football Team, and really the Fog Bowl is the only game they were competitive. They remain the only team in NFL history to lose home wild-card games by 14 or more points in consecutive seasons. Buddy’s teams had personality and swagger and star power. They were just horrible underachievers.
6. Nick Sirianni: It’s only been two years, but Sirianni is already 23-11 in the regular season, one of only five coaches in Eagles history to win multiple playoff games, one of only four to coach a team to a Super Bowl and one of two to lead his first two teams to the postseason (along with Rhodes). The Eagles set a franchise record with 14 wins last year in a 17-game season and came within a play or two of winning the Super Bowl. Will be interesting to see where Sirianni ranks on this list in a few years.
5. Buck Shaw: Shaw’s first Eagles team in 1958 went 2-9-1, but his second went 7-5 and showed some promise. In 1960, the Eagles went 10-2, reeling off nine wins in a row after an opening-day loss to the Browns at Franklin Field. In the NFL Championship Game, the Eagles handed Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr the only postseason losses of their careers. That Packers team had 11 future Hall of Famers and was considered by many invincible. But the Eagles won a historic 17-13 decision at Franklin Field and after the game, the 61-year-old Shaw retired after just three seasons. The Eagles wouldn’t be competitive again until Dick Vermeil arrived 16 years later.
4. Dick Vermeil: To fully understand the impact Vermeil made in his seven years as Eagles head coach, remember that in the 15 years before he arrived – 1961 through 1975 – the Eagles went 74-127-9, the worst record among non-expansion and non-AFL teams. They averaged 4.9 wins during that 15-year span and when Vermeil arrived from UCLA it took some time to really install his culture and his work ethic – especially in an era before free agency. But from 1978 through 1981, the Eagles went 42-22 and had the 3rd-best record in football (behind the Cowboys card game against the Bears at the Vet in 1979 and then demolished the Vikings and Cowboys the next year to reach Super Bowl XV. Vermeil only coached one more year before taking a 14-year break and then leading the Rams to a Super Bowl championship. He was only 54-47 overall as Eagles head coach, but most importantly he guided the franchise back to respectability after a long slog in the second division.
3. Doug Pederson: What Pederson and the 2017 Eagles did was historic and unforgettable and electrifying, going 13-3 and then rolling to the Super Bowl championship with backup quarterback Nick Foles after eight years without a single playoff win. Everything Pederson did in 2017 worked. Every decision, every gamble, every risk, every move. The fact that he wasn’t named Coach of the Year is a travesty. The weird thing about Pederson is that his four other Eagles teams were a combined 29-34-1, although the 2018 team did win the double-doink wild-card game in Chicago. Pederson was only 42-37-1 overall in his five years here, but his four playoff wins are 2nd-most in franchise history behind the guy who hired him, Andy Reid, and he remains one of only three coaches to lead the Eagles to a championship.
2. Andy Reid: It would have been easy to make Big Red No. 1, and I know comparing eras is tricky, but to me it’s pretty simple. Greasy Neale won two championships. Andy won none. But Reid did have a heck of a 14-year run, taking over a team that had won two playoff games in the previous 20 years and reaching the postseason nine of 11 years from 2000 through 2010. Reid’s 10 playoff wins with the Eagles are as many as any other three coaches combined (Pederson 4, Vermeil 3, Neale 3) and account for 40 percent of all Eagles postseason wins in their 90-year history. He’s got more than twice as many wins as any other Eagles coach (130 to Neale’s 63), and during the 11 years from 2000 through 2010, the Eagles had the 4th-best record in football and best in the NFC and won more postseason games than anybody but the Patriots and Steelers. Reid also gets credit for his coaching tree. Ten of his Eagles assistants went on to become head coaches (Brad Childress, David Culley, Leslie Frazier, John Harbaugh, Sean McDermott, Ron Rivera, Pat Shurmur and Steve Spagnuolo from his original 1999 staff, plus Pederson and Todd Bowles). A no-brainer Hall of Famer but not No. 1 in Eagles history.
1. Greasy Neale: Neale’s 10-year stint as Eagles coach is second-longest to Reid in franchise history. He had some very good teams early in his coaching tenure – 7-1-2 in 1944, 7-3 in 1945. But from 1947 through 1949, the Eagles were the best team in football. They reached the 1947 NFL Championship Game, losing to the Cards at Comiskey Park in Chicago, then they recorded back-to-back historic NFL Championship Game shutouts, blanking the Cards 7-0 in a blizzard at Shibe Park in 1948 and the Rams 14-0 in the rain at L.A. Coliseum a year later. The only other team to win two NFL Championships or Super Bowls by shutout in their entire existence is the Packers and they did it 22 years apart – 27-0 over the Giants in 1939 and 37-0 over the Giants in 1961. Every other coach in Eagles history has won two championships combined. Neale won two back-to-back.
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