Two Super Bowl appearances in five years with two different coaches and quarterbacks.
That’s just a portion of the résumé that landed Philadelphia Eagles general manager Howie Roseman atop the GM rankings released by NFL Media’s Gregg Rosenthal on Thursday.
Already the NFL’s reigning executive of the year the Eagles’ Howie Roseman was lauded again Friday when he was named the best GM in the league by Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Media.
Roseman is coming off a season in which his moves resulted in the deepest roster in football an NFC championship and a second Super Bowl appearance in six years for the organization.
Roseman, of course, has been through the wringer over the years in what is a cyclical sport but his foundational philosophies are both time- and battle-tested.
“He stacks good decisions,” a former Eagles scouting executive who once worked with Roseman said.
In the academic world, it’s often explained that good decisions sometimes result in poor outcomes but when you consistently make good decisions you’ve got a better chance of generating positive outcomes. The everyday example often used to explain the sentiment is a weather forecast that calls for 90% rain. On the rare occasion, you might be lugging around the umbrella for no reason but far more often than not in such a scenario you’ll need it.
Under Roseman’s leadership of football operations, the Eagles have become an organization in which others look to when they need to hire either personnel staffers or coaches.
“I love this, I really do,” Roseman said before Super Bowl LVII. “I love having the opportunity to put teams together. I love working with people I care about. I love the competition of it. I don’t know why. I love it. And I don’t take it for granted that I have this opportunity at all.
“Every day I wake up and say, what can I do today to make sure that our team is in a better place, and that the people around me have an opportunity to be successful?”
Roseman joined the Eagles as an intern in 2000 and slowly worked his way up the organization from salary-cap counsel to director of football administration and VP of football administration before getting into the personnel side, ios career goal, in 2008 as VP of player personnel. By 2010 he was named GM for the first time.
He did lose his foothold in personnel during a power struggle with Chip Kelly for one year but was kept as a safety net by Jeffrey Lurie, given a raise and a new title of executive VP of football operations where he was responsible for everything football related but personnel.
After Kelly flamed out, Roseman was back in charge and has been ever since garnering even a longer rope with Lurie, who understands he made a grave mistake by turning away from someone he trusts even for a short period.
“I remember somebody came up to me, like a media person, and said after a bad year, ‘Are you going to do short-term things because you’re worried about your job?’ And I think because I have been here, I care so much about the Eagles and the people who work here, I would never do anything that I didn’t think was in the best interest of this team,” Roseman said. “For the short term and long term. I would never do that because of (my job security).
“This team, this city has given me and my family too much. I would never ever do that. So everything I’m doing is not based on my job security. It’s based on what is right for our ownership, our coaches, our players. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna be right all the time.
“I’m fucking wrong a lot, as we know, but I would never ever do anything that I thought was just best for me, ever.”
