Veteran NFL scribe Peter King dished on polarizing Houston Texans interim general manager Jack Easterby during an appearance with Dale & Keefe on WEEI..
Asked to respond to a new bombshell report published by Sports Illustrated that portrayed Easterby as a power-hungry schemer, King offered a slightly different take on the controversial executive who made the unprecedented jump from team chaplain to one of the top personnel jobs in the sport.
While Easterby is undoubtedly a "hated man" in Houston, according to King, it's not fair in his estimation for the 37-year-old to blamed for all the team's woes.
"Before [former PR executive] Amy Palcic got fired, I talked to her about Jack Easterby, and I said, 'You know what's really weird about this story? I think people out in the world think Jack Easterby has a lot more to do with what happens at the very top of the Houston Texans than he really does.'
"Now, I'm not saying he is without authority -- he certainly does have some authority. But the football decisions, until October 5th or whatever day Bill O'Brien got fired -- every football decision, although Easterby had a say in it, every football decision since he walked in the door there belonged to Bill O'Brien."
The Sports Illustrated report said Easterby had long advocated for trading All-Pro wide receive DeAndre Hopkins, and was instrumental in the dismissal of popular employees including Palcic.
King is less convinced of the Palcic narrative, but conceded Easterby will have a say in choosing the team's next general manager and head coach.
"Jack Easterby did not fire Amy Palcic; the club president did," King said. "But, having said all that, he does have the ear of the owner, Cal McNair, who is not nearly as decisive or authoritative as his father was. And I do think he is going to have the ability to be influential in the GM and perhaps in the head coach that they hire. But I also don't think he's going to make either decision on his own."
Still, King sees Easterby's unlikely rise to interim GM more as a confluence of strange circumstances than as a master plot befitting an episode of Game of Thrones, as the SI story suggested some in the Texans organization had joked.
"So having said all that, he's in a bizarre position. He was brought in sort of as a right-hand man to Bill O'Brien. ... O'Brien trusted him implicitly. Every night in training camp, Easterby had a half-hour meeting with everyone in the building -- middle managers on up, including Bill O'Brien sitting there in the audience. And he said 'OK, here's what we learned from today, here's what we gotta do better tomorrow.' It was that kind of meeting. Everybody reported to him, and all that. So, again, he had a unique role in the organization, but I think to some degree his role has been overstated."
While King appears to disagree with this depiction, he's not oblivious to how many see it that way.
"That doesn't mean people in Houston like him. I mean, he's a hated man. They think that he's been responsible, or in part responsible, for all these horrible decisions, and I really don't think he has been."
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