"My feeling was that we could have two great coaches on defense, that's even better than just having one," Reid said.
Reid would also say, of course, that safeties coach Mike Zordich is a great coach, and line coach Jim Washburn is a great coach and the linebackers coach, whoever that poor devil is, is also a great coach. Same for new secondary coach Todd Bowles. But Reid wasn't talking about it being better to have six great coaches than five. He was talking about having two great coaches running the defense rather than just one.
You can parse the semantics how you like, but that's the guts of it. Spagnuolo wouldn't have been merely riding the tackling dummies, whatever his job description.
"Juan was going to be there and, you know, in this league titles are thrown all over the place, and my feeling was with Spags, both those two together, I thought it could be dynamite," Reid said.
Maybe they would have fudged it just that way, and called Spagnuolo "CEO/Defense" or promoted Castillo into the newly designed "Major General/Defensive Battalion/Hard Work Division" spot. It wouldn't really matter. Spagnuolo could have been the boss of the Eagles defense next season, but somehow thought the Saints offered a better opportunity to win a championship. Go figure.
When Lurie spoke on Jan. 3, he made it clear that making Castillo the defensive coordinator might have been the end of the process a year ago, but it wasn't the beginning or even the middle.
"What Andy did is he made . . . a list of all the top people that he was looking at to replace Sean McDermott as defensive coordinator. And things happen, circumstances happen, and if . . . certain coaches aren't available [then] he became very, very interested in Juan because he knew what he could accomplish," Lurie said.
