LOVERRO: One name stands out among mixed legacies of Eagles coaches

OPINION:

Philadelphia Eagles coach Nick Sirianni is not among the finalists for NFL coach of the year, even though it is his second NFC championship title and trip to the Super Bowl in three years.

If anything, people talk about how the Eagles have been successful in spite of Sirianni, not because of him.

The only Eagles coach to win a Super Bowl, Doug Pederson in 2017, was fired three years later. He got hired again in 2022 to coach the Jacksonville Jaguars. He was fired after this season.

Two of the most heralded coaches in Eagles history — Andy Reid and Dick Vermeil — took Philadelphia teams to Super Bowls, only to lose.

Both would go on to win NFL championships with other teams — Reid won his rings with the team the Eagles face on Sunday in the Kansas City Chiefs. 

In 1960, the Eagles beat the Green Bay Packers in the NFL title game with Buck Shaw as coach in his third year. He retired after that.

The Eagles don’t exactly have a rich history of coaching success on the league championship stage — save for a man nicknamed “Greasy” who once played football with Jim Thorpe, coached a national championship college squad, was the star player for the Cincinnati Reds in the fabled 1919 Black Sox World Series and used the worst loss in Washington football history to help Philadelphia win two consecutive NFL championships.

Earl “Greasy” (a childhood nickname) Neale was born on Nov. 5, 1891, in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He was a star athlete who played both professional baseball and football. He was an end with the legendary Jim Thorpe on the 1917 Canton Bulldogs.

“Jim Thorpe could do anything,” Neale said in a 1964 Sports Illustrated article. “He could kick a ball 80 yards. That was the old pumpkin ball. He could have kicked today’s ball 100 yards.”

After football in the fall, he patrolled the outfield for the Reds in the summer — years before Deion Sanders did. He played eight major league seasons in Cincinnati, with a brief stay with the Phillies, from 1916 to 1924, appearing in 768 games, scoring 319 runs, stealing 139 bases and batting .259.

But in the infamous 1919 World Series, the one in which the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing to help gamblers, Neale had 10 hits in the series and batted .357.

“Got a triple off little Dick Kerr, the honest pitcher,” Neale told Sports Illustrated. “Matter of fact, I think they were all honest after that first game. The ones in on the deal didn’t get the payoff they were promised. The rest of the games were straight, I am convinced.”

Two years later, during the same season Neale played 85 games with the Phillies and Reds, he coached Washington & Jefferson College to a 10-0-1 record and a trip to the Rose Bowl, an appearance that ended with a scoreless tie against California — the only scoreless game in Rose Bowl history. Neale coached the first black quarterback, Charles Fremont West (who would later go on to coach at Howard University), to play in the Rose Bowl. They were awarded a share of the national championship.

“We weren’t supposed to have a chance,” Neale said. “Some experts predicted we’d lose by 28 points. I recall I was in the men’s lounge of the hotel the morning of the game. I was incognito. I heard a loudmouthed fellow somewhere in the room yell out, ’I’m giving 14 points on California. Any takers?’ I hollered back, ’California could start playing right now and play until sundown and they wouldn’t score 14 points on us!’”

Neale bounced around college coaching jobs until 1941, when he was hired as the Eagles coach. 

He coached Philadelphia to the NFL title in 1948 and 1949, leading the Eagles over the Chicago Cardinals in a 7-0 blizzard his first season, following up a year later with a 14-0 drubbing of the Los Angeles Rams in a rainstorm behind the running of Hall of Fame back Steve Van Buren, who rushed for 196 yards on 31 carries.

The blueprint for winning those games, Neale said, was the historic 73-0 beating Washington took from the Chicago Bears in the 1940 NFL championship game.

“I had seen George Halas beat the Washington Redskins 73-0 with the T in the title playoff in 1940,” Neale told Sports Illustrated. “I decided that I would scrap the single and double wing I had used in my collegiate and professional coaching if I could just get the full details of how Halas was using the T. I was having lunch with some old friends one day and at the table there was a fellow from the Fox Movietone News. I got talking to this newsreel man and I said, ’I marvel at the way you fellows seem to catch the outstanding plays of every game in the few minutes you show on the screen. How are you able to do that?’ The fellow said, ’Oh, we film the entire game and select the important plays from the complete footage.’

“I almost choked on my rye whiskey — this was before I swore off — and I said after a minute, ’Would you by any chance have the entire footage of that Bears-Redskins game?’ Neale said. “The fellow said, yes certainly he did. I said, ’Could I buy it?’ I was beginning to shake all over. You must remember this was before the days when teams began exchanging game films.

“I bought that film for $156, and I believe I ran it three, four, five hours a day for three months in the apartment of Lex Thompson, the Eagles’ owner, until I had it down pat,” he said. “I made some alterations, of course, gave it some outside running strength. It was the T, adapted to our horses, that won us three divisional titles and our two NFL championships.”

Neale was fired after the Eagles went 6-6 in 1950 and never coached again. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1967 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame two years later. He died in 1973 at the age of 81.

You won’t hear his name much, if all, on Super Bowl Sunday. We live in a time of B.S. — anything that happened Before Sportscenter is forgotten. But Greasy Neale is the greatest coach in the history of the Philadelphia Eagles, and he’s got the currency that counts in any era — NFL championships, built on the worst failure in Washington football history.

• You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.