Eagles OC Kevin Patullo has firm grasp of the bigger picture. Just ask Chan Gailey

New York Times

4 days ago

On a taxing morning in the fall of 2008, Kevin Patullo walked into a staff room in which the whiteboards were all blank.
The Kansas City Chiefs' offensive coaches, already reeling from a series of losses that would eventually stretch to 14, heard their offensive coordinator, Chan Gailey, pronounce the problem they never anticipated they'd need to solve. They'd lost their starting quarterback, Brodie Croyle, first to a bruised shoulder before a season-ending knee injury. They'd lost their backup, Damon Huard, first to a concussion before a season-ending thumb injury. They were down to their third-stringer, Tyler Thigpen, a former seventh-round pick who'd been a dual-threat quarterback at FCS-level Coastal Carolina.
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Thigpen had only played one prior game for the Chiefs, in 2007 — and it'd only been for two drives. Patullo, then a 27-year-old offensive quality control coach, knew most of the playbook they'd prepared for the 2008 season was out. Gailey needed fresh ideas.
'All right,' Patullo recalled Gailey saying. 'We got to figure out a new offense for this week.'
It's the sort of memory Patullo, a first-time NFL offensive coordinator, uses for reference in his first season as the Philadelphia Eagles' play caller. It's certainly not the most glamorous memory. No Hollywood producer is scrambling for a script about the mental fortitude of a Chiefs regime that was overhauled after losing the most games in team history. Few scribes at the time even noted Patullo's firing, or the young coach the Chiefs hired to fill Patullo's vacancy in offensive quality control … Nick Sirianni.
But Patullo knows football is a game in which victors capitalize on lessons learned from losses. He knows that some of the game's biggest innovations came from coaches who chose creativity over apathy, even though they knew they were already damned. That describes Gailey, whom Patullo called his 'greatest influence' in football schematics. Indeed, the 2008 Chiefs were dreadful. However, the solutions Gailey and his staff drew on those blank whiteboards dramatically improved their efficiency on offense and popularized a concept the NFL hadn't yet explored: the pistol.
'Nobody knew what the pistol was in the NFL,' Patullo said. 'We were successful for the most part. We didn't win a lot of games, but we moved the ball with a bunch of guys that we didn't know really if we could do that with. So (Gailey) being able to show, 'Look, we do what we have to do to win, it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to look a certain way,' was huge.'
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Thigpen, in his only season as a primary starter, lined up in a variety of shotgun alignments (including as a receiver in wildcat formations) during a 10-game stretch in which the Chiefs bumped their scoring offense from last in the NFL (12.5 points per game) to 19th (21.6) and their offensive EPA per play from 29th (-0.14) to 16th (0.07), according to TruMedia. Gailey later used similar concepts as head coach of the Buffalo Bills and offensive coordinator for the New York Jets.
Patullo spent six seasons honing his craft as a problem-solver and game-planner with Gailey: three as an offensive quality control coach in Kansas City and Buffalo, one as the Bills' offensive assistant and assistant wide receivers coach and two as the Jets' quarterback coach. Patullo's variety of roles signaled his eventual rise. Some coaches are experts at certain positions. Some see the bigger picture. Gailey told The Athletic that Patullo 'was able to see the bigger picture better than some other people that I've been around.
'When you can see the big picture, you're able to solve the problems,' said Gailey, 73, who coached for seven NFL teams during his 46-year career. 'Because the biggest picture is how do we take what we have and defeat what they have? That's the big picture. And then once you see that and realize that, then you can start to cut it down to the smaller pieces of how do we get that done?'
To compare the 2008 Chiefs to the 2025 Eagles incites amusement — perhaps an expletive in a Philly bar.
Patullo has access to perhaps the most talented offense in the NFL. All but former starting right guard Mekhi Becton return from a Super Bowl LIX-winning lineup in which Saquon Barkley set the full-season rushing record behind a Pro Bowl-studded offensive line. That invited defensive attention the dual-threat Jalen Hurts exploited through the air with perennial 1,000-yard receivers A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, plus tight end Dallas Goedert. And the Brotherly Shove remains legal.
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Kellen Moore is now head coach of the New Orleans Saints because of his one-year management of the same talent pool. If the Eagles continue their offensive success under Patullo, he'll soon be a head coach himself. But he, like Moore, will be judged against the expectation for the Eagles to rewrite record books and win Super Bowls. He also knows talent alone offers no guarantees of meeting that standard. Patullo was the team's passing coordinator when Sirianni promoted former quarterbacks coach Brian Johnson in 2023 to replace Indianapolis Colts-bound Shane Steichen. An offensive system that reached Super Bowl LVII stalled during a disastrous collapse, largely due to the absence of adaptations within Sirianni-led staff meetings.
It can be argued that Moore benefited from two advantages Patullo lacks: 1) the cracks in the previous system were clearly defined for a schematic foreman hired specifically to attempt repairs, 2) opponents had no film on how the Eagles planned to use Barkley. Coaches who watched the Eagles crush defenses in 2024 while averaging the franchise's most rushing attempts per game (36.5) since 1978 will have spent a full offseason concocting ways to stop them. Patullo must stay a step ahead with adaptations that don't abandon strengths or create needless complexities that could compromise the controls within one of the most coveted cockpits in the NFL.
'You got to have some imagination,' Gailey said.
If there's a succinct phrase that captures how Patullo intends to stay ahead, it's 'building on what our players do best.' He's not espousing the stick-to-the-hits approach that doomed the Eagles in 2023. Instead, Patullo, who on Wednesday spoke to reporters for the first time in his new capacity, articulated an expansion. The Eagles understand their fundamental strengths. Patullo said there will be 'core plays that you know you trust.' But an offensive staff with four new hires — including passing game coordinator Parks Frazier and quarterbacks coach Scot Loeffler — is bringing ideas to staff meetings that add 'other layers' and 'new wrinkles' to the system. They're also weighing the ideas against a 'checklist of things' they expect opposing defenses will attempt.
'We have to be ready to adjust,' Patullo said.
He comes from an idea-generating routine in which Gailey would start post-draft staff meetings by asking his coaches if they'd seen anything on film — NFL, college, high school or otherwise — that they ought to try to develop themselves. 'That's where the ideas would come from,' Gailey said. Once in-season, Gailey said they never focused on attacking a defense until they'd figured out what they had offensively themselves. What players do we have available? What are their strengths? Their weaknesses? Then they'd figure out how they were going to run the ball against their opponent. ('That was always first,' Gailey said.) Then came the play-action game. Then, drop-back passes. Then, situational football.
After 21 years of coaching, Patullo will implement his own routine. Among the things he wanted to remind himself as he began a play-calling role for the first time: 'Just be me.' His debut as an offensive coordinator will be met with two major questions. Do his six years with Gailey give him enough systemic deviation from the seven years he's spent with Sirianni to be creative? And, more importantly, will the first-time OC, at age 43, foster an effective idea-generating process as the leader of a group of veteran assistant coaches and players?
'If you've got to worry about something or think about something, don't lose sleep over that one,' Gailey said. 'Whether he's gonna be able to handle the room, run the show, do all that. That's a non-issue in my book.'
'Now I know how Jalen feels,' Jordan Mailata said. 'This is crazy.'
A sixth play caller in six seasons? Mailata, the Eagles' starting left tackle, knows his quarterback has had it worse. Hurts has had 11 play callers dating to his college days at Alabama and Oklahoma. The ever-growing list is a worn-out fact that likely remains relevant so long as Hurts and Sirianni are together.
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Continuity is elusive in the NovaCare Complex. And as the last two years proved, sometimes overrated. The Sirianni-era Eagles have experienced enough transitions to strike a balance between systemic overhauls and simply running it back. Sirianni, who officially promoted Patullo 10 days after Super Bowl LIX, aimed to address any shortcomings in the idea-generation department by hiring Frazier and Loeffler. The Eagles believe those hires complement Patullo's strengths in the management and implementation department, where he'll turn to the player relationships he has formed since joining the Eagles in 2021.
None are more important than Patullo's partnership with Hurts. The disorder within the 2023 collapse created a disconnect between Hurts and Sirianni that was repaired in the orderliness that followed Moore's hiring. Hurts and Sirianni reached their communicative stride in 2024 with a series of phone calls during the Week 5 bye, and Hurts spent every Tuesday night on the phone with Moore as they put together the week's initial game plan. Patullo emphasized that he and Hurts are entering their fifth season together. He said they've already formed a routine in OTAs in which Hurts is 'willing to try anything and then we can have dialogue after and kind of go from there.'
'Everyone's in a good place,' Hurts said of his relationship with Patullo. 'Everyone's focused, and everyone cares about their duties and what they're supposed to do. And we've always had some type of communication in the past in (game) prep. So nothing really changes in terms of that. It's just kind of people with different titles.'
As for the Patullo-led system, Hurts said, 'there's some nuances that are different.' Last year, Hurts said Moore's system was '95 percent' new. With no need for such a drastic overhaul this time, Hurts still stressed that the Eagles are still 'very early' in the development stage of how this year's offense will evolve. They know from their adaptation after last year's Week 5 bye how plans formed in the summer can require change. Hurts underlined how the Chiefs aimed to stop Barkley in Super Bowl LIX, which gave way to a performance by the quarterback that won him the game's MVP trophy.
'Ultimately, we just have to find ways to play complementary football and continue to build off of what we've done,' Hurts said. 'But also knowing that it's only a template. It's only a reference in a sense, you know. And you gotta continue to grow from that and learn from the good references and the not-so-good references in a sense of what our success was. Just building that out, it'll evolve, it'll be what it'll be. Whatever it is, let's just find ways to win.'
The dialogue between the Eagles' offensive coaching staff and players has ranged from combative to conducive. Mailata said Patullo's tenure in Philly 'makes it easy' for them to approach their new play caller with ideas. Mailata said he's already had conversations with Patullo about the system's terminology — 'something that we can clear up to make it easier for all positions.' The sixth-year left tackle has also approached his new play caller with schematic ideas.
'Because of our relationship, he can tell us, 'Yeah, that was bad. That's a bad idea. Here's why,'' Mailata said. 'But it's not just like, 'That's bad,' shut down. It's a why. And then I learned something that day. It's like, 'OK, great. Maybe I should just stick to playing online.''
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The rapid rotation of Eagles play callers reminds Patullo of the stakes ahead. Succeed, and he can become a head coach like Steichen and Moore. Fail, and he can be fired like Johnson. As Gailey said, Patullo always had a distinct grasp of the bigger picture. But as Patullo's debut as an NFL play caller approaches, he's reminding himself that he's prepared for this moment.
'To be honest, you're just kind of doing your job,' Patullo said. 'If you look at something like that big picture, I guess it could be overwhelming. But this is what I do. This is what I wanted to do. I've been wanting to do it, and I have an opportunity to do it, and like I said, I've got a great staff around me, great players, great organization — everything. So it'll be fun.'