Though former Browns G.M. Phil Savage remains only a consultant with the Eagles, he has done enough good work for the team to give him the juice to help land a job for one of his former employees.
The Eagles have hired former Ravens and Browns scout Daniel Jeremiah, who spent the 2009 season and most of the 2010 offseason using his experience as a scout to build a promising niche in the media world as a draft expert. He had amassed more than 18,000 Twitter followers on his “MoveTheSticks” account, and he had become a semi-regular on some of the ESPN pre-draft programming.
Previously a production assistant at ESPN (and still closely tied to men like Chris Mortensen), Jeremiah’s connection to Savage through Jeremiah’s father, prominent evangelist Dr. David Jeremiah, landed Daniel his initial NFL job in Baltimore. Jeremiah then was hired by the Browns when Savage became G.M. there.
Jordan Ranaan of CSNPhilly.com points out that Jeremiah’s Twitter account and corresponding website abruptly have disappeared. And possibly for good reason. Ranaan recalls that Jeremiah was conspicuously pro-Eagles.
“He liked the trade for former Browns linebacker Ernie Sims,” Ranaan writes. “He is a big Kevin Kolb supporter. He believes Donovan McNabb is overrated. He thinks Stewart Bradley is a Top 5 middle linebacker in the NFL. Tight end Clay Harbor was one of his favorite guys in the draft. He believed Daniel Te’o-Nesheim was one of the most underrated players in the draft. He expressed his admiration for the overall organization and praised their draft.”
Jeremiah was wise to get out of the media business once he went to work for the Eagles. Even if the Eagles would have allowed it, his audience would have regarded Jeremiah as an extension of Eagles.com blogger Dave Spadaro -- a paid employee of the team who surely will be saying only good things about it.
But the deeper question, in our view, is whether Jeremiah pulled the plug on his media ventures from the first moment he decided to try to get a job with them. Once Savage was hired as a consultant, did he and Jeremiah discuss whether Savage would try his best to get Jeremiah back in to an NFL job? And did Jeremiah write good things about the Eagles knowing that he had a good chance at scoring a job with the team after the 2010 draft?
One league source with knowledge of the Savage-Jeremiah dynamics believes that getting Jeremiah a job was one of Savage’s priorities once he landed in Philly, and that Jeremiah undoubtedly was aware of that effort.
We’ve got nothing against Jeremiah. He seemed to do a good job -- although our sources who are current NFL scouts and front-office personnel have conditioned us to be generally leery about fired NFL scouts and front-office personnel who show up in the media, especially when their agenda seems to be parlaying a media platform into getting another NFL job. But this phenomenon raises real questions about what the fired scouts and front-office personnel may have secretly cooking behind the scenes, and whether that is influencing the opinions they are providing.
That’s why the most credible former scouts and front-office types (and coaches, for that matter) are the ones who are willing to say, “I’m out, and they’re not gonna pull me back in.”