Former Eagles GM Joe Banner: Carson Wentz’s season puts Colts in a tough situation

Former Eagles president Joe Banner is doing a weekly Q&A with Inquirer Eagles reporter EJ Smith. This week, the two discuss Carson Wentz’s late-season struggles, Nick Sirianni’s rank among first-year coaches, and the head-coaching openings across the league.

EJ: What was your reaction to the way Carson Wentz finished the season?

JB: He did not have a good season. He had some ups and downs, but he didn’t have a good season. He had a good supporting cast, I think with some of the injuries to the offensive line, it was a little overrated when we got to the end. Without being in the building and talking to him directly and seeing how he’s handling different things, I’m not sure it’s something we have enough information to make a sound decision about.

That said, if I had traded a first and a third for Carson and watched the way he just played this year, I would be very worried about whether we were in the right hands and if I had the right answer in the long run. But there’s things we can’t know that would be very important to me to answer that question, so I don’t say that like I know what I would do if I was there, but I surely know I’d be worried. And I’d have to have some real heart-to-heart conversations with him and hopefully feel like he was willing to do what it would take to get him back to what it looked like he could be three or four years ago.

I’m not sure you can give up after one year, but you sure don’t want to just go into next year and assume Year 2 will be better. I think it’s more complicated than that. So far, it looks like a huge, lopsided trade. Time will tell whether it stays that way, but there’s a lot of evidence that says it’s likely to stay that way.

EJ: I know we’ve talked before about Nick Sirianni compared to other first-year coaches, but how have the last few weeks changed where he ranks among those guys?

JB: Certainly through the second half of the season he’s been raising his grade, so to speak, in ways that I think matter and are likely to project positively going forward, although it’s always hard to project those things.

A lot of it is around handling adversity, as we’ve discussed, when things aren’t going well, it is most important to have the right coach with the right relationships with his team leaders and have the credibility he needs with players to get them to listen and be willing to follow. In the strategic element of playing the games I think he’s also done well.

Based on Year One, if we were just grading them, I’d say he’s certainly either first or second in terms of team performance and how well they’ve set the stage for the future. Despite the criticism in the last couple days, I also think Brandon Staley has done a really good job. Like Nick, it’s not perfect, it’s not like there was no learning curve. It’s not like I agree with everything he’s done, but I think he has done the key things they talk about. He’s built good relationships with the team, established himself as a leader and hired a really good staff.

Again, we have to see if the upside of the staff plays out, we’ve discussed Gannon, who I don’t think we’d give a great grade to in his first year. But there’s a lot of reasons to believe that he’ll still do well, too. By the way, also just being open-minded to keeping some of the staff that was already there that he may not have known. Too many coaches just want fresh starts and people that are loyal to them. He didn’t fall into that trap.

We’re one year in and I think the grades are good. Some of them in areas that should project to the future. There are so few coaches who can really adapt and show true flexibility during a season. So the fact that he did that in such a significant way is the most positive indicator. It isn’t the record or making the playoffs, it’s the ability to work through tough times successfully and showing flexibility and adaptability that many successful coaches have. To me, those are the two most compelling positives.

EJ: Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, general manager Howie Roseman, and yourself when you were with the team, have all developed a reputation of hiring coaches that weren’t among the hot names in that cycle. When you hire someone under the radar like that, do you really know if you’ve found someone special at the time of the hire?

JB: If you’ve asked the right question, you have an educated guess. That’s all it is. There’s really no way to know, it’s such a limited amount of time for such a crucial decision. Most teams hiring coaches will spend somewhere between five and eight hours with that coach, which is a good time to get a lot of information and have a lot of topics covered, but you can’t feel like you can project everything. It’s hard to project these things with people you actually know really well, like people on your own staff.

You go into it with very high hopes, but you know what you don’t know. There’s uncertainty even when you’re really confident. Like, in a case like Andy Reid, it was very quickly that we were looking at each other going, ‘Wow, I think we really nailed this.’ I think that’s actually fairly unusual.

I don’t know if Nick is Andy-like where they know they got the right guy already or if they’re really encouraged but what they’re seeing but waiting for time to tell them. They certainly have to feel good about what’s happened so far.

EJ: You said you knew right away with Reid. What was it about him that made it so obvious?

JB: People in general — and I think this is especially true of my experience in the NFL — are at times kind of setting up excuses or explanations for why things didn’t go as well as they had hoped. Kind of a version of covering their [butt]. It was so obvious, literally within a matter of weeks, that the possibility of not succeeding and therefore setting up any excuses had never even crossed Andy’s mind.

The level of true, deep-rooted confidence without being even slightly arrogant was not the norm in the league and it stood out. It was even noticed by players quickly. If you’re going to lead people, that’s a great thing to have, that they immediately believe in you. It’s hard to lead people if they don’t believe in you or they don’t trust you.

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EJ: Which coaching decision surprised you the most yesterday?

JB: I just don’t get the Brian Flores situation at all. This was an organization that struggled to win and the few times it has, it’s been kind of brief. I think they finally had a coach in place that gave them a chance to do really well and sustain success.

It is true that there was some tension within the office, but there has been a long list of teams that have been very successful even with front offices that didn’t function to the degree of collaboration that you would like. I would not get rid of somebody that I think is so instrumental in the success they had over that.

It, to me, is an example of where an owner who isn’t present in the office every day can sometimes get a bit disconnected, which makes it harder for the owner to be part of the solution to a problem when there are these kind of conflicts on teams.

The only one that surprised, and I think it’s a mistake, is the Dolphins situation. I think it’s a significant mistake. I don’t think the talent is good enough, that even if they got to the point where they had to make a firing, I think they fired the wrong guy. I probably wouldn’t have fired either, honestly. If I felt like it was so bad that I had to change something, I would have been much more inclined to keep the head coach than the general manager.

If you’re Miami and you can’t tolerate some friction between the owner or the GM, then at the right moment, you would not have hired Bill Belichick. You wouldn’t hire Bill Parcells, you wouldn’t hire Bill Walsh. Some of the greatest coaches in this league are people who were difficult to work with.

EJ: Flores getting fired reopened the conversation about the lack of diversity in the head-coaching ranks. How do you view the league’s efforts to correct course there?

JB: I think there’s a lot more positive work behind the scenes getting more opportunities for diverse candidates. I can’t tell you whether that’s going to happen in one year or three, but I think we’re already heading in the right direction, finally, with the right people prioritizing it.

There are two things that changed. There are more candidates that are clearly qualified who are ready to be head coaches when we look at who’s been hired over the years. Even more importantly, if we’re looking for a true long-term solution, there are many more diverse candidates, all the way from internships to quality control coaches. There is a diverse pool of people filling those jobs now. It may be five or 10 years before those people have big jobs, but that’s been part of the failure of this process.

I think the healthy way to look at this is to not project any anecdote as an answer in either direction. When Flores got the job, it didn’t mean this was fixed, and him getting fired doesn’t mean we’re still as bad as we were five years ago. Take a look at the situations individually. You have to have a mindset that this is important, and we’re going to deal with it and we’re going to put resources into it and talk about it and prioritize it. Then we won’t be sitting there with so many candidates that are on the edge of getting all the way to the top rung of head coaches, we’ll just have enlarged the pool of qualified people in a significant way.

We went through this with African American quarterbacks as well, there weren’t any for so long. Part of that was because colleges were taking African American players who were quarterbacks and changing their position. Some of them went along with this because they perceived there was no opportunity for them in the NFL as a quarterback.

Now, drafting an African American quarterback No. 1 isn’t even noteworthy. There was a time that drafting an African American quarterback at all was noteworthy. I do think we’ll get to that point with coaches. I understand people have been saying this for 10 or 20 years and it’s like, “I don’t want to hear about this anymore, just show me.” To me, it’s clear that we’re right on the precipice of that happening.

It is absolutely true that there was a long time where this was more of a conversation than it was action. It was just a PR exercise. Now we have real action. I’m really confident that it’s going to translate into meaningful movement.