Eagles Suspend Search For Personnel Head

The Eagles have temporarily halted their search for a new personnel exec and are not expected to make a hire until after the draft, a league source confirmed.

Geoff Mosher was first with the report.

The Eagles, who have no scouting chief after firing coach Chip Kelly and top personnel executive Ed Marynowitz, are looking for a high-ranking senior executive to lead the scouting department and determine the fate of current scouts, per sources, but they opened their search at a time when NFL teams are knee deep in the pre-draft process and would be reluctant to allow a top personnel executive to leave.

Teams don’t normally allow an experienced, senior executive to walk out their doors about one month from free agency and less than three months from the draft.

So the Eagles, who are marching forward with first-time head coach Doug Pederson, have temporarily suspended their search.

Jeffrey Lurie announced at Doug Pederson‘s introductory press conference that they were about to begin their search for a new personnel head. Those efforts ramped up in Mobile, as the Eagles hoped to have someone in place around the time of the Super Bowl.

The Eagles met with about six candidates in all, per a source, including Steelers pro personnel coordinator Brandon Hunt. They also had some level of interest in former Browns vice president of player personnel Morocco Brown. While it’s still possible one of the early candidates gets the gig, the Eagles are choosing to cast a wider net after the draft when scouting contracts typically expire.

While that may be a smart move long-term, the Eagles find themselves short-handed as they head into some of the more critical months of the pre-draft process. They are also currently operating without a college scouting director, as Mosher notes.

Right now, the team’s top talent evaluators are Roseman, Tom Donahoe and Pederson. Roseman went a year without having any say in personnel decisions after losing a power struggle to Kelly last January and Donahoe, promoted from senior adviser to senior player personnel director while the Eagles are without a personnel head, has mainly patrolled the northeast and hasn’t done much field scouting across the country.

The highest-ranking college scout on the staff is Trey Brown, who was promoted by Marynowitz last June to assistant college scouting director. The team didn’t need an official director because Kelly was so heavily involved in scouting college prospects.

Donahoe, still living in Pittsburgh, has been serving in a consultant role as opposed to full-time. Pederson is brand new head coach and has his hands full as-is. Lurie has been stressing the importance of having a “collaborative approach,” but without a key personnel figure in place it appears the show will belong to Roseman, who was largely out of the scouting game this year himself.