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PHILADELPHIA — Winning the Super Bowl is difficult.
For proof, ask Eagles fans from the Baby Boomer generation who had to wait 52 years for it to happen, then still couldn’t believe it when it finally did.
Winning back-to-back Super Bowls is extremely difficult.
In the 59-year history of the big game, it has happened just nine times. Since the creation of free agency in 1993, only three teams have done it. Winning the Super Bowl with a first-time offensive play caller?
That’s unheard of.
It has never happened. Never. Not once.
Kevin Patullo, the lightning rod behind the Eagles’ stunning offensive regression this season, has a chance to become the first.
But the numbers under Patullo’s offense haven’t been good: The Eagles rank 24th in total offense, averaging less than 200 passing yards per game. Quarterback Jalen Hurts has looked lost at times. The rushing attack, led by Saquon Barkley, has been nonexistent at points in the season.
Now, the Eagles are about to begin their quest for another title, and the pressure is on Patullo to get the offense going.
There’s plenty of reason to believe — and many people who do so — that Patullo won’t be the first first-time offensive play-caller to lift the Lombardi Trophy in Santa Clara, Calif., in a few weeks.
Nick Sirianni isn’t one of them.
“I thought (he did) a nice job of handling everything that’s come his way (this season), staying mentally sharp and mentally tough,” the Eagles coach said this week as he and his offensive coordinator prepared for Sunday’s first-round playoff game with the San Francisco 49ers. “I know there’s always going to be criticism and ... as offensive coordinator, you might not get as much praise. But you’re always going to get some criticism. I think he’s done a nice job handling that, and I think that we’ve done some really good things and we’re getting better as the season goes through.”
The criticism of Patullo has often been harsh — and one time, it crossed the line when his home in Moorestown was egged in late November.
There’s no denying, however, that the Eagles’ offense has struggled in Patullo’s first season in charge of the offense.
A year ago, Kellen Moore came on board after four seasons of calling the plays with the Cowboys and one with the Chargers. The Eagles, after some early-season struggles, decided the offense would run through Barkley. It became a championship formula. The team finished first in rushing attempts, second in rushing yards and 32nd in passing attempts while remaining seventh in points and eighth in overall yards for the second straight year.
When the postseason arrived, the Eagles’ offense kicked into another gear, averaging 36.3 points per game while scoring a record 55 points in the NFC Championship and another 40 in the Super Bowl win over the Kansas City Chiefs.
This year, after trying to stick to the same rushing formula that worked last year early in the season, the Eagles were forced to try a variety of things but never found any offensive consistency. They finished 19th in scoring and 24th in yards, marking the worst production during Sirianni’s five seasons as the coach. The Eagles finished 18th in rushing yards and 11th in attempts.
It’s possible Patullo will become the team’s scapegoat, depending on how long the Eagles’ playoff run lasts.
Just ask those who have experienced it.
“I would say in Philadelphia, it’s going to have to do with Kevin Patullo whether that’s fair or not,” former Eagles offensive coordinator Brad Childress told NJ Advance Media in an interview from his Florida home earlier this week.
Knowing this territory
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Forme Eagles coach Andy Reid, left and ex-offensive coordinator Brad Childress talk during training camp in 2004.AP
Childress, who spent seven years coaching under Andy Reid with the Eagles before becoming the head coach of the Vikings in 2006, knows how unforgiving the people of Philadelphia can be. He remembers well how brutal the criticism of Reid was during their first season together.
Reid had worked for seven seasons under Mike Holmgren in Green Bay before the Eagles hired him to replace Ray Rhodes in 1999. He arrived having never called the plays at any level. He also inherited a really bad team with an especially bad offense. Reid plugged in a journeyman named Doug Pederson to play quarterback while he tutored rookie first-round pick Donovan McNabb in the early stages of the season.
The team started 2-7 and averaged 12.7 points per game in that stretch. The fans didn’t like Pederson much and they pretty much thought Reid was a buffoon. Social media wasn’t a thing yet, but anti-social messages were.
“Early in our tenure when I was the quarterbacks coach, I had to ask Andy a question about Donovan as we were heading off the field after warmups,” Childress said. “He was walking off toward the tunnel with Butch Buchanico (the Big Dom of that era) and Andy goes, ‘Oh, hold on. I want you to listen for a second.’ ”
The expletives started flying in Reid’s direction.
“You fat (bleep), you big piece of (bleep) ... why don’t you eat another cheesesteak?” Childress recalled. “That was all in about three and a half seconds. It was ridiculous.”
Marty Mornhinweg, who replaced Childress as the Eagles’ offensive coordinator in 2006, used to tell a story about when he was the head coach in Detroit. Reid would call and hang his phone out of his car window when leaving Veterans Stadium so Mornhinweg could hear fans yelling obscenities at him.
Reid, of course, improved as a play caller when McNabb replaced Pederson as the starting quarterback. He now stands as one of the great offensive minds in the history of the league.
The stories from the Reid days probably wouldn’t make Patullo feel any better about the things he has had to deal with in his first season as a play caller.
“It’s not fun,” Childress said. “It’s not fun for you, it’s not fun for your family, your wife, your kids who have to hear things on the playground. As a coach, you have to have that bunker mentality and you have to call the things you believe have a chance to win against the defense. It often comes down to execution, so it’s more technical than most people know.”
Does a great defense impact play calling?
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Buffalo Bills' Josh Allen (17) is sacked by Philadelphia Eagles' Jalyx Hunt (58) during the second half of an NFL football game, Sunday, Dec. 28, 2025, in Buffalo, N.Y. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)AP
Defense wins championships. And for the Eagles, that’s a very good thing.
While the Eagles’ offense has taken a significant step back this season, the defense has remained elite and gained steam as the season has worn on. There has been speculation that Patullo and Sirianni have become more conservative on offense.
Perhaps the most positive statistic the Eagles offense can turn to as they prepare for the playoffs is turnovers. The Eagles only have 15 turnovers this season — tied for the fourth fewest in the NFL — and two of them came on special teams and another was a Week 18 interception by backup QB Tanner McKee.
Take away the five-turnover disaster against the Chargers on Dec. 8 and the Eagles were by far the best team in the NFL at protecting the football.
“Park it right there,” Mornhinweg said. “There’s no instance where you can overemphasize ball security. Turnover ratio is the biggest factor in winning games in the NFL, period.”
Mornhinweg does, however, believe that some of that is cyclical and it doesn’t factor into a game plan.
He also doesn’t believe the Eagles should be more conservative just because they have a great defense, something that appeared to happen during the team’s 13-12 win at Buffalo in Week 17.
“I know some teams will play toward their defense and be a little more conservative,” Mornhinweg said. “My belief, and this goes back to Andy, Mike Holmgren and Bill Walsh, is that once you get one of the top defenses, that’s when you can be even more aggressive because when it backfires, which it will, now you’ve got a defense that can still stop them.
“It might blow up on you on a rare occasion, but over the course of a game and a season, it pays off tenfold. I remember we used to ask (former Eagles defensive coordinator) Jim Johnson ... if he wanted us to be aggressive in a one-score game when the other team had two timeouts, and he’d always say, ‘Go for it.’ But it has become more of a situational game and you don’t see it as much any more.”
Patullo, 44, was asked this week who influenced him most as an offensive play caller and his answer was fascinating for a couple reasons.
He went back to his early coaching days when he was an offensive quality control coach with the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills.
“Chan Gailey is somebody when I first started who really took me under his wing,” Patullo said. “I watched him do different things in different places. We had a situation when I was with (the Chiefs) — Herm Edwards was the coach and we had no quarterbacks. We were down to our third-string quarterback Tyler Thigpen and he only knew a no-huddle system and he never called plays before. We ended up switching the entire offense in the middle of the year to basically go with a spread no huddle, which nobody was doing in 2008.
“We were the first team to [run] the pistol and Chan was all about doing whatever you had to do to win the game. I quickly learned that from him.”
Those Chiefs went 1-10 with Thigpen at quarterback, so the story lost its luster. Gailey, however, did almost become the answer to this trivia question: Who was the first rookie NFL offensive coordinator to win the Super Bowl?
The answer is Mike Holmgren, whose San Francisco 49ers beat Gailey’s Broncos 55-10 in 1990. Both men were rookie coordinators in the NFL, but they had called plays in the past at the college level.
Patullo, on the other hand, is calling plays for the first time in his life at 44. He has discovered that it’s a job that can make you an unpopular figure fast. The only way he’ll be able to silence his critics is if the offense springs to life in the next five weeks and the Eagles win another championship.
Can he do it? His job might depend on it.
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