Mannion hopes to make Eagle offense fly

Baltimore’s Declan Doyle (30) is the NFL’s youngest offensive coordinator, but Philadelphia’s Sean Mannion (34) isn’t far behind (courtesy Philadelphia Eagles)

Like Super Bowl MVPs who declare “I’m going to Disney World” in those iconic TV commercials, Sean Mannion has a date with Mickey, Donald and Goofy.

When I caught up with the new offensive coordinator of the Philadelphia Eagles, he was catching a flight to Orlando with wife Megan and their three young children to begin a richly deserved vacation.

Megan and Sean Mannion will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary on July 8

In late January, the former Oregon State quarterback continued his brisk ascension up the coaching ranks to O-coordinator of a franchise that has reached the NFL playoffs in eight of the last nine seasons, including a Super Bowl victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in February 2025.

Mannion, 34, retired after a nine-year NFL playing career in 2023. In February 2024, he was hired by Green Bay as an offensive assistant working with quarterbacks and the passing game. The next season, Sean was elevated to quarterbacks coach with the retirement of Tom Clements. After one season in that role, Mannion landed one of 32 O-coordinator jobs atop the football food chain.

“I am really excited,” Mannion tells me. “I am very thankful to the Eagles, Mr. Lurie, Howie and Nick for trusting me and giving me what I consider is an unbelievable opportunity.”

The references are to Jeff Lurie, the Eagles’ owner; Howie Roseman, the club’s executive vice president, and coach Nick Sirianni, who took a chance on someone who is considered a potential rising star in the coaching ranks.

The Eagles’ coaching staff began work the day after the Super Bowl. In April, the players came in for 12 days of “voluntary” training and conditioning.

“We had a good offseason program,” Mannion said. “A lot of teaching, a lot of learning, and we got some competitive periods against the defense, which was great for us. I love the guys I get to work with on a daily basis — great players, great coaches. It has been a blast. Now we have a short break before training camp, and then it starts again.”

Mannion has made a positive first impression, including with former Eagles center Jason Kelce, who co-hosts a podcast with his more famous brother called “New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce.”

“I am very excited about what Sean is going to bring,” Jason said in a recent podcast. “I like that he is a young coach who has been climbing fast, a guy people in the league think highly of. I am very excited to see how this molds in the Eagles offense.”

Philadelphia has had a revolving door, with a new O-coordinator every year since 2022. Mannion replaces Kevin Patella, who was on the job for only one season. The Eagles went 11-6 and won the NFC East, but lost to the 49ers 23-19 in the playoffs. The offense was mediocre at best. The Eagles were 19th in the NFL in scoring (379 points), 24th in total offense (5,291 yards), 23rd in pass offense (3,303) and 18th in rush offense (1,988).

The talent is there to turn things around, Mannion believes. Among those he will be working with are 2025 Super Bowl MVP Jalen Hurts at quarterback and Saquon Barkley at running back. Barkley was 10th in the league with 1,140 yards and seven touchdowns rushing in 2025 after leading the league with 2,005 yards and 13 TDs the previous campaign.

Barkley sounded impressed when asked by reporters about Mannion.

“I have never seen a system like this,” Barkley said. “It’s refreshing. I am excited to work in Sean’s new offense.”

Mannion came away encouraged after his first look at the Eagles’ offensive players.

“Jalen has been really fun to work with,” he says. “He is super talented, a hungry learner, attacks each day with wanting to get better. Saquan is the best back in the league in my opinion. He can affect the game in many different ways. I am excited about our receiver group, our tight end group, and the offensive line is a really attractive part of this job. It is outstanding, with talent and depth.”

The Mannions — who celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary on July 8 — have girls ages seven and six and a boy who soon turns three. In March they purchased a house in Haddonfield, N.J., a Philadelphia suburb just across the Delaware River. “It is a 16-minute commute (to the Eagles practice facility),” Sean says. “Over the Walt Whitman Bridge, and I am there.”

Mannion and Sirianni had never met before the latter reached out in late January, when Sean was serving as offensive coordinator for the West team in the East-West Shrine Game in Dallas.

“I got a call from Nick out of the blue a couple of days before the game,” Mannion says. “He asked if I wanted to interview for the coordinator position. We hopped on a Zoom call that night. It came together quickly. I feel great about Nick as a guy to work for. I have respected the hell out of his teams.”

Philadelphia knocked off Green Bay 22-10 in an NFC wild-card playoff game in January 2025. The Eagles also beat the Packers 10-7 in a regular-season game last season.

“Nick is a tremendously detailed guy, super locked in on all the fundamentals, the situational elements of football,” Mannion says. “I felt like it was a good fit — a good football fit, a good personality fit — from the jump.”

Sirianni interviewed several candidates for the job. Mannion was the one who won him over.

“I am thrilled to have Sean on board,” he said after the hiring. “I felt it was important to be patient and thorough to allow the right fit to reveal himself to us. Sean did just that. It was quickly apparent that he is a bright young coach with a tremendous future ahead of him in this league.”

How does Mannion feel about climbing so high in the coaching ranks so quickly?

“I never thought of it that way,” he says. “Honestly, I have been trying to take more of a short-sighted approach, that I am going to try to do the best job I can with what is in front of me and learn as much as I can. All along the way (during his playing career), I was filing things away, hoping that someday I am going to get a chance to use it. Fortunately, it came this year.”

On my Mount Rushmore of Oregon State quarterbacks: Terry Baker, Steve Preece, Matt Moore and Sean Mannion. (Derek Anderson and Jonathan Smith deserve inclusion, too, but there is room for only four busts, and those four were my favorites to watch.)

Mannion played three years of varsity football under his father, John Mannion, at Foothill High in Pleasanton, Calif. Sean wasn’t highly recruited. Oregon State coach Mike Riley provided his only scholarship offer, though UCLA, Washington State and San Diego State were also recruiting him.

“(The Beavers) offered me early,” Mannion says. “I looked at it and felt, amongst the schools I was looking at, if they had all offered me, this would be my choice. I really wanted to play for Coach Riley and Coach Langsdorf (Danny, the O-coordinator). It was, ‘Let’s commit right away,’ and I never looked back. I felt convicted that it was the right place for me. I was appreciative that they believed in me. I didn’t need to prolong things any further. I felt good about it.”

Mannion was among a handful of prep junior quarterbacks on Riley’s recruiting list after the 2008 season. During the summer of 2009, most of them attended Oregon State’s summer camp in Corvallis, including Sean.

“We had a rating on each guy going into the camp,” says Riley, now retired and living in Corvallis. “After the camp, we re-ranked them, and Sean came out on top. I called him and made him our first offer of a quarterback. I told him, ‘I don’t like to do this, but I am going to give you a week to decide. If not, we will go on to the next guy.’ He called me back and took it. We were pleased with that, and we were even more pleased as time went by.”

With sophomore Ryan Katz the starter at quarterback, Mannion redshirted his first season at OSU.

“Sean was a football junkie from the time he got here,” Riley says. “During the summer, he was asking the (grad assistants) to open the building at night so he could go in and watch film on his own.

“As it turned out, we had a quarterback and star player who was our hardest worker. That set a tone for the team. Everyone knew how invested the guy was. He was always well-prepared, a very good player, and we had a lot of fun together.”

Mannion — who grew to 225 pounds on his 6-6 frame — beat out Katz as a redshirt freshman and became a four-year starter for the Beavers, completing 64.6 percent of his passes for 13,600 yards and 83 touchdowns with 54 interceptions in 43 games.

“Sean had a big arm, and was knowledgeable about where to go with the football,” Riley says. “He knew our offense, knew all of our pass progressions and knew what to do with the ball. That is so important for a quarterback — to discern what to do with it, and do it quickly. He could make any throw you wanted, and he could do it accurately. He was extremely competitive, too. He was my kind of quarterback.”

Mannion’s best season was as a junior in 2013, when he completed 400 of 603 passes (66.3 percent) for 4,662 yards — then a Pac-12 single-season record; it now ranks fifth — with a school-record 37 TDs with 15 picks. That was the season that Brandin Cooks won the Biletnikoff Trophy as the nation’s outstanding receiver, with 128 receptions for 1,730 yards and 16 TDs.

“The chemistry between Sean and Cooks was not an accident,” Riley says. “That was through preparation in the summertime. Whatever we could do to get Brandin one-on-one (with a defender), we were going to go to him. That connection with Sean was developed through a long period of hard work and creating chemistry that comes only through repetition.”

Mannion averaged 358.6 yards passing per game that season. He threw for five touchdowns against Utah and a school-record six against Colorado.

But it wasn’t just a Mannion/Cooks show. Seven receivers caught 25 passes or more. Tight ends Connor Hamlett, Caleb Smith and Kellen Clute combined for 84 catches. And running backs Terron Ward and Storm Woods combined for 998 yards and 11 scores rushing on a team that started 6-1, then lost five straight — to nationally ranked Stanford, Arizona State and Oregon along with USC and Washington — before beating Boise State 38-23 in the Hawaii Bowl.

“That was a fun team,” Mannion says. “Everybody was making contributions. It was a good offensive unit as a whole. Those are memories that put a smile on my face, thinking about it today.”

Mannion’s career yardage broke the Pac-12 record held by Southern Cal’s Matt Barkley and still stands second behind Washington State’s Luke Falk (14,486 yards from 2014-17).

“You think about all the turning points in your life,” Mannion says. “At Oregon State, I got an opportunity to play a ton of football with great coaches and great teammates. The butterfly effect of a few things here, a few things there. … It was a life-changing moment when they offered me a scholarship and committed.”

Mannion developed a special relationship with Riley.

“Playing for him, you learn to be even keel, to take things one at a time, to work to get better day by day,” Mannion says. “Never get too high or too low. He was so process-oriented. It was about incremental improvement, about treating people the right way, knowing that over time you are going to be in a good spot.

“I can’t speak any higher of Coach Riley. I hold him in the highest rgard as a person, as a coach, as a leader of men. Now in the next phase of my life as a coach, I think of how he molded me into the way I try to be, the way I try to communicate with players, the way I try to build relationships and be a teacher. He was all those things.”

Mannion was a third-round pick by St. Louis in the NFL draft. It began a nine-year process as a backup in which he was with the Rams, Minnesota and Seattle, putting in three stints apiece with the Vikings and Seahawks. Sean played in only 14 games, starting three, completing 67 of 110 passes for 571 yards and one TD with three interceptions.

“I was fortunate,” he says. “I was a backup for a long time. Every guy who gets into an NFL camp was a tremendous college player and likely a multiple-years starter, so it was an adjustment. What I realized after a year or two was, ‘Hey, I’m learning a ton. I am getting better. I can carve out a nice career and be a part of great teams.’

“You hope to get a chance to play, but even when you are not playing, you continue your own personal development kind of silently on the practice field. I found that tremendously rewarding. And to get to rub shoulders with the coaches I crossed paths with — I pinch myself.”

During his first four seasons with the Rams, he played for Jeff Fisher and Sean McVay. The O-coordinator his final year there was Matt LaFleur, now Green Bay’s head coach and Mannion’s boss last season.

“A life-changing relationship for me,” he says, adding the names of Zac Taylor (Cincinnati Bengals head coach, Mannion’s quarterbacks coach with the Rams in 2018) and Shane Waldron (Jacksonville Jaguars passing game coach, in the same capacity with the Rams in 2018).

In 2019, Mannion signed with Minnesota, where his head coach was Mike Zimmer and O-coordinators were Kevin Stefanski, Gary Kubiak and Klint Kubiak (Gary’s son).

“I hit the jackpot again,” Mannion says. “Mike was a great head coach. Gary was a tremendous mentor.”

Mannion spent his final two seasons as a player with Seattle, where Pete Carroll was head coach and Waldron O-coordinator. Sean never saw the playing field, but was already converting his mindset from player to coach.

“Sean was preparing for coaching while he was still playing,” Riley says. “We talked when he was with the Seahawks. He said, ‘I don’t know when the end is coming. It might be after this year, but I want to do what I can to start prepping for getting a coaching job when I am done.’

“We talked about all the contacts he had made. I recommended that he stay in touch with those guys, start paving the way to get ready for that. He was actually putting together coaching/teaching tapes while he was playing. I admired that. He knew what he wanted to do, and was searching for the best avenue to do that.”

It actually started way before that. Maybe in kindergarten.

“Sean has always been about football,” his father says. “He was a ballboy for me growing up. While he loved playing, he had always looked to coach when his playing days ended. I was not surprised he got into coaching.

“Sean was lucky. Coach Riley and his staff were with him for five years at Oregon State. There was so much continuity and development there. That is unheard of these days. And he ended up with some great coaches in the NFL. He always was learning, taking meticulous notes and saving everything. He was preparing for the day when he had a chance like he has now.”

“I was going to play as long as I could, and then I was going to coach,” Sean says. “Not only did it help form my abilities as a player, I get to learn from all those people. I was very blessed in my career. I was able to file things away, knowing what was going to be next.”

Mannion’s two seasons with the Green Bay coaching staff put him in close quarters with LaFleur, O-coordinator Adam Stenavich, Clements and O-line coach Luke Butkus.

“I will always be grateful to Coach LaFleur,” Sean says. “He gave me a start in this league. I had a relationship with him with the Rams. He gave me a start with the Packers, where I was drawing runs and doing the quality control job. What a great experience for me, even in just that year alone — him exposing me to the run game. He had a vision for me.

“I was grateful to work with Coach Stenavich and Coach Butkus and still be around the quarterbacks. It was the perfect blend for me to dive head-first into the run game. Also, to still be in the quarterback room and get to learn from Tom, an unbelievable quarterbacks coach. I learned tons of stuff.”

After Clements retired, Mannion’s quarterbacks coach duties had him tutoring Packer QBs Jordan Love and Malik Willis.

“I was very fortunate to work with them and our great staff,” he says “One thing led to another, and here I am.”

With all of the major influences Mannion has had in his career, the largest is probably his father.

“It doesn’t get any bigger than your dad,” Sean says. “He raised me and made so many sacrifices for me and my siblings growing up. From a football perspective, the first part is exposure to the game. I grew up on a football field, at practice, watching him take the guys into the weight room. I got to see that it’s not just about game day, it’s what happens on the practice field, what happens during the offseason when you are training.

Sean Mannion credits his father, John, as a “huge” influence both in football and life in general (courtesy John Mannion)

“He was influential as my father, but also by exposing me to the game at such an early age, building up my love to the game. And it came together organically. I wanted to spend time with my dad. That meant tagging along with him to practice. I learned about how to build a program, the work that goes into it. He helped me as a player, but crafted me as a coach as well.”

John Mannion retired following the 2022 season after 35 years of coaching. After Sean arrived at Oregon State, parents John and Inga moved to Oregon, where John took over as head coach at Silverton High. After seven years at the Foxes helm he moved to Mountainside, where he retired after six seasons, though he still teaches here.

John now writes a monthly Substack column, a newsletter than goes out to 2,000 coaches across the country. He is involved with an OSAA mentorship program for new coaches and hosts an annual coaches clinic in the state.

“I want to be a resource for coaches in the area,” says Mannion, 58, who lives in Tigard with his second wife, Mary. “In the fall, I do some scouting and film work. I am still very much involved, just not day to day.”

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In January, when he served as O-coordinator at the East-West Shrine Game, Sean called plays for the first time in his career. (Unless you count the one game in 2020, during the pandemic, when he called a game for his dad for Mountainside High.)

“It was really fun for me to put together a game plan and call it and work with a lot of young coaches who did a great job,” Mannion says of his Shrine Game experience. “I had a great time.”

In an Eagles press release, Sirianni said he is impressed by Mannion’s “systematic views on offensive football and his strategic approach.” To what was he referring?

“Think about how in football, every piece needs to fit together,” Sean says. “The run game and the pass game have to fit together. You want to build a system where it is not just rote memorization. We have a family of plays. One thing builds off the next. You want to try to make as many things where step one leads to step two, which leads to step three.

“I am a big believer that coaching is teaching in its truest form. I pride myself in trying to be a great teacher first. We are going to teach formations, nail down our splits and our alignments, how we move people around with motion. We dedicate a lot of time to those things. From there, we build the scheme off of that where everything can be as interchangeable as possible, and give us the maximum degree of adaptability and flexibility going into the season.

“For me, it comes down to the teaching progression and making sure you have built a system where things can subsist off one another. As we laid out a plan for our offseason program and who we want to be as an offense, it was all thinking about the teaching progression and building a system that can be taught with a super strong foundation.”

Sirianni will have his say in how the Eagles’ offense is run next season. But there will be a definite Green Bay influence, too.

“The biggest thing we stressed throughout the spring was play style,” Mannion says. “We want to be a team that plays hard, that marries the run and pass games. We want our play style to jump off the tape. When you turn on an Eagles tape, what does that offense look like? It is physicality; it is finish. “Schematically, I have a background in the things we did in Green Bay. That is going to be a huge part of what we do. I want to maximize our players. We can do that with the things we did in Green Bay, and we can continue to add and evolve elements that members of our staff are bringing from their other stops, and from Nick’s background that they have done well. Ultimately, we want to build this thing and continue to make it better. We don’t ever want to stay the same. We want to keep building and improving on our system.”

The Eagles are a month away from the July 23 start to training camp at NovaCare Complex in south Philly. Does Mannion have tangible goals for the offense next season, perhaps numbers he would like to reach statistically?

“I don’t approach it that way,” he says. “You take notes on every play at practice. As you are going, you are thinking things like, ‘That’s great finish. That’s great effort. That’s a great combination block up front.’ You try to hone in on those markers more than any statistical measurement.

“We are not coming into this thing saying we need to be at this benchmark or that one. We don’t attach those type of numbers for the unit. The larger and more prevailing theme for us is the play style element.”

Mannion texted JaMarcus Shephard after he landed the Oregon State coaching job and eventually had a phone conversation. Mannion says he holds Kalen DeBoer — Shephard’s head coach at Alabama — in high regard.

“I let (Shephard) know he has a big fan here,” Mannion says. “I will be cheering them on for sure.

“It is really unfortunate what has happened at Oregon State. (The Beavers) have been in a period of transition but I feel like they are going to be in a great spot in the new Pac-12. Coach Shephard is going to do a great job, I am excited about what he is bringing.

“Hopefully, the dust will settle the right way. Oregon State has a great program with a great history. They are going to build this thing back up. I will always be pulling for them.”

Mannion’s focus now, though, is on his job with the Eagles. On helping them win and perhaps building a resume that might one day put him in line for a head coaching position.

“Anything is possible with Sean,” Riley says. “He has had a good start with the Eagles, and I know why. He is a smart young guy, and he is totally prepared. He doesn’t do anything without being prepared. He will gain the confidence of the players around him, and he will be successful, and who knows what goes from there.”

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