Immediately following their bye week, the Texans have made a noteworthy front office move. The team has parted ways with executive vice president of football operations Jack Easterby effective immediately, per ESPN’s Adam Schefter (Twitter link).
The 39-year-old began his NFL career as a character coach with the Chiefs and Patriots. He was hired by the Texans in 2019, and held a significant role that season, as the team operated without a general manager. That marked the beginning of his unexpected rise to power in the organization.
One month into the 2020 season, head coach Bill O’Brien – who had since taken on the GM title as well – was fired. Easterby was named as his front office replacement, though the Texans made it clear that he was doing so only on an interim basis. The pair were often linked together with respect to high-profile decisions, including the Laremy Tunsil and DeAndre Hopkins deals made that season.
The following offseason, Houston made the expected move of hiring Nick Caserio as GM, a fellow Patriots alum whom Easterby was central in recruiting to the Texans. That move apparently laid the foundation for the changes in the organization which have resulted in Easterby’s departure – something which Pro Football Network’s Aaron Wilson tweets is not viewed as surprising.
“It was just time,” one source on the matter told Wilson. “No knock on Jack at all. He did a lot of really good things in implementing a lot of the programs they have in place, but the organization has reached a point where it has a lot of great people to work on these programs behind the scenes to help the players and help the coaches. This isn’t like a huge controversy. These things happen in the NFL. Jack will have a lot of great opportunities going forward.”
Finally!!
A new day has dawned.
I’ll take “Dysfunctional Front Office Setups” for $300.
They have a long way to go but this is a step in the right direction.
3 years too late
Welcome back to New England, Jack.
He burned that bridge. The Patriots would not even hire him for the only job he is qualified cleaning toilets
It’s about time. I’ve seen inept owners promote unqualified cronies to positions of power many times, but letting a young chaplain climb the ranks to getting involved in personnel and contracts was a special kind of dysfunction.
If I’m a QB throwing a Hail Mary pass I probably wouldn’t mind having a chaplain on my side.
Touché, although then you’d probably want a catholic one, not an evangelical one.
I’m not sure how many of the tabloid accusations against Easterby were true, but at the very least we must agree that it seemed odd that someone with zero background in managing NFL rosters or coaching them ended up essentially as the GM. It seemed that ESPN tried very hard to pin all of the Texans’ on Easterby, but at the same time, there were a lot of questions about how the Bill O’Brien debacle ended. If Easterby gets another NFL job, I suppose we’ll see how much of that follows him there.
Well, I guess Josh McCown’s hope of stepping into an NFL head-coaching job without working for it just flew out the window.