AP

On the surface, it appears that Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie had far more patience with coach Andy Reid than what Lurie had with coach Chip Kelly. Reid, after all, made it through 14 years in Philly. Kelly survived only three.

But Reid was released after consecutive failed seasons. Before that, he consistently followed every non-playoff appearance with a postseason berth. For Kelly, who also was fired after two straight years with no playoffs, that simply happened 11 years sooner.

It happened 11 years sooner because Kelly didn’t have a great player at the most important position of the 11 on either side of the ball.

Reid did, thanks to his decision to resist a local push for running back Ricky Williams and to select quarterback Donovan McNabb in 1999. With McNabb, the Eagles had 11 years of contention. Without him, it quickly bottomed out, with Kevin Kolb to Mike Vick to Nick Foles to Reid landing in Kansas City.

Reid, who knew how to get value for mediocre quarterbacks from teams desperate to shore up the position, once grifted the Cardinals in unloading Kolb, one of several signal-callers who played in Arizona between Kurt Warner and Carson Palmer. Defensive end Calais Campbell played for the Cardinals from the final days of Warner’s career through today, and Campbell recently explained on PFT Live the importance of great quarterback play.

“If you don’t have a quarterback you can’t win,” Campbell said. “I’m a defensive player and my mindset is defense wins championships, but you really don’t have the opportunity without a quarterback. . . . And when you can have an elite quarterback with a great defense that’s when you have a real chance to make a run for the ring. At the end of the year we wanna hoist that trophy and Carson gives us a great opportunity. When we played in years past with some other quarterbacks, you knew it was kind of tough because we were going to have to do a lot more on the defensive side of the ball. But now we know that if we’re having struggles he’ll bail it out and if he’s having struggles we’ll bail it out. He’s doesn’t struggle too often.”

The message for the coveted coaching candidates to be pursued by struggling teams for 2016 is clear: Pick a team with a quarterback you believe in, or otherwise have a plan for getting one. If you don’t, you’ll soon be looking for work elsewhere.

Unless you get lucky and the next Tom Brady is lurking at the bottom of round six, and 15 years later you’re regarded as one of the best coaches in the history of the game thanks in large part to the presence of one of the best quarterbacks in the history of the game.