The Eagles Hire Sean Mannion. Here Is Why It Makes Sense
The Philadelphia Eagles won Super Bowl LIX in February 2025, beating the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22 in one of the most thorough championship performances in recent NFL memory. Jalen Hurts was named MVP. Saquon Barkley dominated the regular season and much of the playoffs, while the defense was relentless. By almost every measure, it was a complete team operating at its highest level.
Then 2025 happened.
The Eagles entered the season carrying one of the most talented offensive rosters in football, returning nearly the entire nucleus from a championship run. The expectation was not unreasonable: pick up where you left off, run it back. Instead, the offense quietly came apart. Not in some dramatic, singular collapse. More like a slow leak no one could quite locate until the tank was already dry.
The root of it was structural. When offensive coordinator Kellen Moore departed to become head coach of the New Orleans Saints, Philadelphia promoted Kevin Patullo from within. Patullo had been the team’s pass game coordinator for years. He knew the players, knew the system, and had spent years earning trust from Sirianni and the roster alike. Keeping things familiar seemed like the sensible play.
It was not.
Patullo’s offense finished 19th in points per game and 24th in total yards, a collapse from the seventh- and eighth-ranked teams the year before, with largely the same personnel. The Eagles led the league in three-and-outs. They scored fewer than 20 points in nine of their final 14 games, and against winning opponents, they cracked 19 points only once all season.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. The deeper problem was how the offense was constructed from play to play. Patullo leaned heavily on hitch routes and inside zone runs, often out of the same formations week after week. Defenses figured out the rhythm quickly because there was very little variation to disrupt it. There was minimal motion pre-snap, few route combinations designed to scheme receivers open, and a reluctance to string plays together in ways that built on each other. Each drive felt like it was being called in isolation rather than as part of a larger offensive plan.
The consequences showed up in the skill positions. A.J. Brown, one of the most productive receivers in the NFL, spent stretches of the season publicly frustrated with how he was being used. His targets dropped. His involvement felt inconsistent and unpredictable. Hurts threw for 185 yards or fewer nine times during the regular season. Barkley’s workload swung without clear logic. The offense had the pieces. It simply could not get them moving together.
The wild-card loss to San Francisco, 23-19, closed the book on it. Hurts threw for only 168 yards. Brown had three catches for 25 yards (and a few drops). Philadelphia did not score a second-half touchdown. Patullo was removed the following week.
The Eagles have now hired Sean Mannion as their new offensive coordinator.
Mannion is 33. He has never called plays in an NFL game. That fact will be the first thing most people (Eagles fans) will focus on, and it is worth acknowledging. This is not a hire built on an established track record of running an offense. But that is not actually what the Eagles were looking for. They were looking for someone who could bring clarity back to a room that had lost it.
Mannion spent nine seasons as an NFL quarterback, drafted by the St. Louis Rams in the third round of the 2015 draft after setting Oregon State’s all-time passing records with 13,600 career yards. He sat in quarterbacks’ rooms with some of the sharpest offensive minds in the game, including Sean McVay, Kevin O’Connell, and Zac Taylor. He watched how those coaches built offenses, how reads were designed to flow, how rhythm was built into a game plan rather than hoped for.
When his playing career ended after 2023, he joined the Green Bay Packers as an offensive assistant and spent two seasons working primarily with Jordan Love and backup Malik Willis. Willis, who had been largely written off after his time in Tennessee, threw for 422 yards and three touchdowns with no interceptions in four games under Mannion’s guidance. That kind of development reflects a coach who understands how quarterbacks process the game, not just how to draw up plays.
The Eagles did not need someone to reinvent their offense. They needed someone to organize it. Hurts, Brown, Barkley, and a talented offensive line do not require a wholesale schematic overhaul. They require a coordinator who can simplify pre-snap reads, sequence plays with intention, and build a game plan that flows logically from one concept to the next. They need someone who will keep the offense moving without abandoning what already works with this roster. They need someone who can create an offense that will keep their opponents guessing, showing one look that can go any way at any time.
Mannion’s background in the Shanahan coaching tree, his deep familiarity with how quarterbacks learn and process information, and his reputation among NFL coaches as a prepared and methodical thinker make him a fit for exactly that role. This is not a flashy hire. It is a precise one.
There will be an adjustment period. The learning curve is real, and no one should pretend otherwise. But for a team defending a championship, what matters most right now is not novelty. It is competence. It is cohesion. It is getting the pieces that are already there to function the way they are capable of functioning. That is what the Eagles hired Sean Mannion to do.