Eagles’ Catherine Raiche and Brandon Brown garner interest from Vikings for GM job
Raiche was promoted to VP of football operations last May, making her the highest-ranking woman in any NFL front office. Brown was promoted to director of player personnel at the same time.
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The Eagles received interview requests for two members of their front office late Wednesday.
The Minnesota Vikings want both Catherine Raiche and Brandon Brown to interview for their open general manager job, a league source confirmed. ESPN was the first to report the news.
Raiche was promoted to vice president of football operations last May, making her the highest-ranking woman in any NFL front office. Brown was promoted to co-director of player personnel at the same time.
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The Vikings fired coach Mike Zimmer and executive Rick Spielman earlier this week and are one of three teams looking for a new general manager along with the New York Giants and Chicago Bears.
The Vikings’ request marks the first time a team has formally asked to interview a woman for an NFL general manager’s job. Susan Tose Spencer became the first female GM in NFL history while running the Eagles from 1983 to 1985, but she was promoted to the role by her father, former Eagles owner Leonard Tose, after spending several years working various jobs on the team’s front office.
The Miami Marlins hired Kim Ng as their general manager in 2020, making her the first female GM in Major League Baseball history.
Raiche is a Montreal native and a former tax lawyer who broke into the business through the Canadian Football League in 2015. She spent two years as the Montreal Alouettes’ coordinator of football administration before being promoted to assistant general manager in 2017. The following year, she was promoted to director of football administration, and she joined the Eagles’ front office the season after that.
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Raiche spent this season in the same role that Browns GM Andrew Berry held with the Eagles in 2019, and her role was described similarly. She has been involved in almost everything across the landscape of front-office duties, including football operations, contracts, personnel and research.
Brown, a Black man, is in his fifth season with the Eagles and his first as co-director of player personnel alongside Ian Cunningham. He was the team’s director of pro scouting from 2019-20 and the assistant director of pro scouting for two years before that. The promotion he received last May expanded his job to do “crossover work” on college prospects while overseeing the team’s pro scouting.
The NFL expanded the Rooney Rule, which previously required teams to interview minority candidates for head-coaching vacancies, to apply to GM and coordinator jobs as well. Also a part of the updated rules from 2020: The Eagles would receive two compensatory third-round picks over the next two years if Brown or Raiche is hired in this cycle.
Brown played college football at Fordham before earning a law degree from Barry University in Florida. He is now the second Black executive in the Eagles’ front office to garner interest for a GM job in the last three years, with Berry being the first.
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Brown has been credited for his part in the team’s discovering Jordan Mailata during the 2017 pre-draft process. He was the first scout to see Mailata in person and interviewed him for two hours at the NFL’s International Player Pathway Program pro day five weeks before the draft.
“It was almost like when you’re young and you go to a party and you identify the pretty girl and make sure she has your number first,” Brown said earlier this season about securing time with Mailata. “You don’t get [beat out] by anybody else.”
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The Eagles have dealt with teams hiring from their front-office staff several times in the last few seasons. Berry left for the Browns and Joe Douglas was the team’s VP of player personnel for three years before taking the Jets’ GM job.
It’s a bit surprising that Andy Weidl, the team’s highest-ranking personnel executive underneath Howie Roseman, hasn’t been tapped for interviews yet. Weidl has been the team’s vice president of player personnel for the last three years since Douglas left and has played a major role in the team’s roster construction.