The fact that Sean Mannion is going to call plays from the coaches’ box this Sunday does not bother me.

It did bother me a little, sitting down to write this on the 25^th anniversary of 9/11, when I realized that the Eagles‘ offensive coordinator was nine years old that day.

Then I started thinking about how Mannion was playing in the league as recently as 2023, and that led to me thinking about who some of his teammates might have been. Turns out, in Mannion’s junior season at Oregon State, the guy snapping the ball to him was Isaac Seumalo. (Seumalo would have been Mannion’s center the next season, as well, but Seumalo missed that year with an injury.)

The Eagles aren’t just bringing in an entirely new offensive concept for 2026, the much-discussed Shanahan/McVay system, they are bringing in a version of it installed by someone with a two-year career coaching résumé who has never installed anything before. That doesn’t mean he isn’t really smart, or that all these preseason stories are meaningless, about his precocity as a quarterback who was the son and grandson of coaches.

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