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How Philadelphia Eagles' head coach achieves Super success with 'Ted Lasso' management style

Feb 3, 2025

2 min

Kyle Emich
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Not long after Nick Sirianni was hired by the Philadelphia Eagles in 2021, fans started noticing similarities between the head coach and TV’s Ted Lasso. The University of Delaware's Kyle Emich can discuss how Sirianni's team approach compares to the more top-down structure favored by Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid.


Like Lasso – a high school football coach on the Apple TV show of the same name who takes over an English soccer club with no prior experience – Sirianni is responsible for the culture, first and foremost. He relies on his coordinators, who call the plays. In essence, he is a more collaborative leader. By contrast, Reid is a top-down coach who currently calls the plays and always has, dating back to his time as coach of the Eagles. Philadelphia fans became more than a little weary of him saying "that's on me" at post-game press conferences following disappointing losses. With back-to-back Super Bowl titles under his belt with the Chiefs, it's difficult to argue with the success of Reid's style now.


This could be fodder for sports talk radio, but it's also something Emich, a professor of management, can discuss from an academic perspective. The professor says there's advantages and disadvantages to both:


• "The main advantages for the top-down approach are speed of decision-making and extreme novelty (you can do whatever pops into your head). The advantages of the coordinator approach are a larger information base to draw from and specialized knowledge."


• "The more team-based approach has a lot of potential, but is difficult to execute well because it requires coordination."


Emich, who has discussed management and sports teams several times in the past (including Super Bowl LII, when the Eagles defeated the New England Patriots), is available for interviews.

Connect with:
Kyle Emich

Kyle Emich

Associate Professor, Management

Prof. Emich's research explores the role of individual attributes in team dynamics and other collective environments.

Cognitive ProcessingLeadershipOrganizational BehaviorTeam DynamicsGroup Dynamics

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