ESPN analyst Ron Jaworski was involved in the Eagles’ head coaching search and even sat in on interviews.
According to Philly.com’s Les Bowen, Jaworski, a former Eagles quarterback, served as a “special adviser” to the search committee and sat in on the interviews with Adam Gase and Ben McAdoo. Unsurprisingly, then, he’s a big fan of the team’s eventual hire, Doug Pederson.
“The Eagles did a tremendous job – I can’t say that any more emphatically – throughout this process, of putting together a quality list of candidates to be the head coach,” said Jaworski.
“We weren’t hiring a line cook at a restaurant here – we were hiring a head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles,” Jaworski continued. “The interviews with Adam Gase and Ben McAdoo were eight, nine hours. They were intense…everybody was focused, everyone stayed the course. The goal was – this came right from Jeffrey Lurie, when we first got together – ‘I don’t care if it’s an offensive guy, a defensive guy, a special-teams guy, I want the best coach for the Philadelphia Eagles.’ I think we got the best guy for the Philadelphia Eagles in Doug Pederson.”
Jaworski knows the game and the Eagles well, so it does make sense that he was asked to be involved. Still, it’s a bit odd to see such a well-known media personality involved at a personnel level. It’s probably for the best that we didn’t know about this as the search was happening, though, or I bet the rumors surrounding a certain colleague of Jaws’s would’ve been even louder.
