Who's Alec Halaby? The NFL might soon find out about the Eagles' assistant GM

In general manager searches, Alec Halaby tends to be labeled on the outside as an “analytics” candidate. He went to Harvard, but he didn’t play with Ryan Fitzpatrick in the Ivy League. He’s been a panelist at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. And he received his start with the Eagles in a data-based role. 

But Halaby’s title as “assistant general manager” is literal — he assists in generally managing the entire operation. If Howie Roseman is a two-time executive year of the year for putting together Super Bowl rosters, then it’s fair to say the scope of Halaby’s current role in Philadelphia would closely mirror Roseman’s role.

“So the bulk of my time is spent on personnel with our pro guys, with our college guys,” Halaby said earlier this season in a wide-ranging interview. “But I spend a lot of time on analytics, and obviously have a history there. Spend a lot of time with cap guys, a lot of time with sports performance, a lot of time with our coaches. I’m grateful that Howie lets me …work across all those different areas. And it keeps you sort of continuously learning throughout your career. And understanding how the whole operation works.”

That understanding of the entire operation is why Halaby is a candidate in Washington and Carolina, which both have general manager vacancies.

Halaby has been with the Eagles for 16 years, joining the organization full-time as a player personnel analyst in 2010 after internships in football operations in 2007 and 2009. He was the special assistant to the general manager from 2012 to 2015 — a real title, not a Dwight Schrute designation — and spent the last of those three seasons exiled with Roseman to the non-football side of the building. When Roseman was reinstalled in a football decision-making role, Halaby was named vice president of football operations and strategy. He became assistant general manager during the front-office restructuring in 2022, essentially becoming Roseman’s No. 2 for football decisions. (Jon Ferrari, the Eagles’ other assistant general manager, is more responsible for operations and compliance.)

This resume means Halaby has spent his entire football career in one building — and with Roseman as his only boss. During that period, he’s been exposed to four different head coaches (Andy Reid, Chip Kelly, Doug Pederson, and Nick Sirianni) and witnessed different styles of leading a team. He also made note of the amount of coordinators and position coaches with whom he worked. Plus, the Eagles have had a revolving door of front-office staffers. This allowed Halaby to create his own roster-building approach. 

“I think Howie and I are pretty aligned,” Halaby said. “I’ve been working under him for so long. I think we’re aligned in that respect. Without getting too much into the positional variation and details, I think what you see with the Eagles is fundamentally how I look at roster building as well.”

So a team’s pursuit in Halaby is trying to capitalize on what’s worked from the Eagles’ front office, which has been poached in recent seasons. (Ian Cunningham and Brandon Brown, two former directors in the front office who are now assistant general managers elsewhere, are also on the interview circuit.) 

It’s true that Halaby is not the prototype of a general manager candidate from when he entered the league in 2010, although he’s an example of how owner Jeffrey Lurie identified that role’s evolution during the past decade. When the Eagles won the Super Bowl during the 2017 season, Lurie emphasized that  “to be in charge of football operations, it is so much more than simply what has been in the past decades with scouting.” He cited the need to collect information, use technology, video, data, and sports science in decision-making, and manage an entire football operations department. 

But it’s also true that building a roster with the best players is a fundamental part of the job, which makes player evaluation an essential quality.

“As long as I’ve been here, if I’m gonna evaluate someone, I’m going to look at the numbers and I’m going to look at the video,” Halaby said. “Now certainly some of the roles and responsibilities have changed over time, but it has been always like, since I came into the league and thought that you need to understand the player through both those lenses, that you weren’t going to capture it all through analytics and you weren’t going to capture it all just visually.”

Halaby added he would be “handicapping” himself if he used only one piece of information — the data or the visual element. He tries to consider where he might overindex one factor or under-weigh another so he could properly use them in conjunction. And even though there can be a simplistic delineation between quantitative and qualitative analysis, Halaby does not consider the two within conflict. 

“We’re trying to make the best decision that we can to emerge on the most accurate evaluation of a player,” Halaby said. “And so we’re going to use all the information we have… Some of it comes in structured data, some of that we absorb visually. And so then how you blend those things depends a lot on — I think a lot of factors that go into that — it can depend a lot on the market you’re operating in, at the position you’re looking at, how much you feel like you’re capturing the structure data versus visually. So that changes a lot depending on the question and player and type of thing we’re looking at.”

Halaby hears from people who want to pursue football analytics, and he said he never considered  his pursuit within that label. It was simply how he consumed football. He would watch a game and then look at the data. Who was a better running back: Barry Sanders or Emmitt Smith? It might have been a classic lunch table debate when Halaby first developed a passion for the game. Using numbers was one way to make the assessment. 

“It was just a natural way to figure out who’s good and who’s not and what their strengths and weaknesses were,” Halaby said. “Certainly when I was that age, I could not analyze the technical aspects of the game.”

That analysis came with time. He called it a “15-year process” that started in his early-20s. He gave the example of sitting with Howard Mudd and Jim Washburn and learned about line play. Similar to Roseman, Halaby leaned upon those who worked for the Eagles to develop his eye for player evaluation.

“I think just sitting down with different coaches with different people over a long, long period of time and trying to pick up different things, see how they see the game, what I may be missing, trying to learn from that,” Halaby said. “So that’s been a really long, long process. …I knew I have a lot to learn — I didn’t play in college. I played in high school. I tried to educate myself as well as I could but knew that I probably have to over-educated myself and it’s something I love to do.”

This does not mean he hasn’t encountered resistance. The exile with Roseman was, as he termed it, an “interesting inflection point” in his career. Had the 2015 Eagles experienced more success, it’s fair to presume Halaby would have needed to go elsewhere. As it turned out, he stayed with Roseman and continued ascending with the Eagles. He explained he tried to use it as a chance to grow, although it was a clear illustration of the fragile nature of a job in the NFL.

There was reported friction during the Pederson era with Halaby (and the data-oriented group he oversaw) and the coaching and scouting part of the operation. Halaby maintains a different interpretation of those dynamics.

“The narrative outside wasn’t how I experienced it inside,” Halaby said. “…I would say I learned a lot from Doug.”

As a general manager, Halaby would need to maintain a strong connection both with the head coach and the ownership group. Those two relationships are critical in the position. Halaby’s had considerable exposure to both Jeffrey Lurie and head coaches with the Eagles, and he said Roseman has been open about the decisions and conflicts that come across the desk of the general manager. Although he might be fortunate to have that type of exposure to a general manager with a non-traditional background, Halaby said he hasn’t viewed Roseman from that perspective. 

“I just think of, he’s done it,” Halaby said. “He’s been a great GM for a long time. And he’s been the person that gave me my first opportunity. So yeah, it’s always been important.”

And the next opportunity? That would require him to leave Roseman and the only organization he’s known in the NFL. It will also require someone who’s been known as a mysterious behind-the-scenes figure to take on more of a public spotlight.

So who’s Alec Halaby? The league might soon find out.

“This has been a great training ground,” Halaby said. “I think I learned a lot from Howie, from Jeffrey, from different coaches and personnel people here. I’d like to think I’m ready for that, but also realize that everyone gets in that seat and they discover a bunch of things they weren’t prepared for. So I think you really just stay laser-focused on learning as much as you absolutely can and prepare yourself as well as you can for when that does come.”