SI Does a Scathing Profile of Jack Easterby and How He's Destroying the Texans

Allow me to reintroduce Jack Easterby, who manages all football operations and directs the overall culture of the organization for the Houston Texans. If that sounds like a weird way to describe someone's job, don't take it up with me. That's exactly how he describes himself on the team's official website. 

I've mentioned him before. Not because I'm typically follower of the inner workings of the Houston front office. If there's, say, a TexansCon you won't see me cosplaying as Bob McNair or anything. I'm just weirdly fascinated by this guy's climb to power. How he was serving as more or less the Patriots team chaplain. Sort of the players' guidance counselor. The Morality Coordinator who was there to talk to guys and offer personal and spiritual advice and not much more. 

But he wanted control. Actual power to make football decisions. So by all accounts, he schemed behind the scenes. Like I've said before, I truly believe he was the anonymous "multiple sources" whenever someone wrote a piece that made the Patriots look bad,. And I have it on good authority people inside the organization believe that too. 

Eventually he made it to a mid-level position with the Texans football operations. And then began a climb that has seen people around him get fired, including Bill O'Brien, GM Brian Gaine and the team's PR director Amy Palcic, while he climbed to the top of the franchise's power structure. He also tried - and failed - to steal Nick Caserio away from his old team. That is not a bad year and a half for a guy who's qualification for the job is a degree in Theology. 

So I compared him to The High Sparrow in "Game of Thrones," a religious figure who uses his knowledge of divinity to gain power and earthly possessions. It seemed like a natural metaphor. But according to this incredible in-depth profile in Sports Illustrated, several people in the Texans organization think I've got the right show, the wrong character:

Source - The film study for one Texans player suddenly required a different kind of source material. … watching: Game of Thrones. …

[I]t had become something of a reference point among more than a dozen Texans coaches, players and team personnel, who likened the individuals at the top of the organization to characters in the TV drama.

General manager Brian Gaine was Robb Stark, the intended future King of the North, who was murdered by the end of Season 3. (Gaine would be fired after only 17 months as GM.) Coach Bill O’Brien was compared to King Joffrey Baratheon, a hot-headed ruler prone to screaming and chopping off heads, only to be poisoned in Season 4. …

Then there was Jack Easterby, hired as the franchise’s executive vice president of team development in April 2019, a man who’d risen from low-level Jaguars intern to Patriots team chaplain to lauded character coach—before making an unprecedented shift into football operations. Easterby, those Texans told each other, was Littlefinger, the nickname of Petyr Baelish, a shadowy and cunning operative who on TV espoused righteousness as a strategy, but sought to consolidate power through chaos and isolation and the pulling of strings behind the scenes. 

Not bad. "Chaos is a ladder" and all that. But I still think the Sparrow works better because they're both seen as men of God. It continues:

A player found insight into his own workplace from a dramaseries about the vicious and unrelenting pursuit of power. “That’s why I was able to read them,” the player says of the trio of decision makers, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “I knew who it was going to be [at the end].” …

Easterby’s sudden ascent to power has generated intense curiosity and, depending on whom you ask, either admiration or scrutiny. He has not conducted any on-the-record interviews since September, leaving others to make sense of perhaps the NFL’s most polarizing executive. …

Many in Houston, though, have not seen him as the congenial confidant and Belichick foil. Rather, they describe an authority figure whose leadership style sows distrust and division, at times flouting rules and straining relationships inside the building. Meanwhile, his responsibilities expanded despite questions surrounding his credentials. 

Conversations with more than 40 people—current and former Texans football operations staff and players, colleagues from Easterby’s time in New England, those from his past in and out of football—provided detailed accounts of his alleged role in, among other things:

• Undermining other executives and decision-makers, including the head coach who helped bring him to Houston.
• The team’s holding workouts at the head strength coach’s house during the COVID-19 pandemic after the NFL had ordered franchises to shut down all facilities, shortly before a breakout of infections among players.
• Advocating for a trade of star receiver DeAndre Hopkins soon after arriving in Houston—one season before Hopkins was sent to Arizona in a widely panned deal.
• Fostering a culture of distrust among staff and players to the point that one Texan and two other staffers believed players were being surveilled outside the building. …

[C]olleagues who spoke to SI—many requesting anonymity, like the player, for fear of retribution—said they felt compelled to share their own truth in the hopes of opening the eyes of McNair, of whom one source said: “[He] is just blinded.” There is a perception inside the Texans’ building that Easterby won a power struggle, completing his climb. And in doing so, these sources say, the character coach brought in to improve the culture has made it worse. …

“It’s still a long-, long-shot story, right?” says one NFL executive who worked directly with Easterby in the past. “You’re not going to be the team chaplain, then, 10 years later, you’re the interim GM. That just doesn’t happen in our league.” … 

While Easterby aspires to be a transformational leader, guided by religion and morality, people who have worked alongside him in Houston have increasingly come to see him as transactional. Says a colleague: “If you combine a faith-healing televangelist with Littlefinger, you’d get Jack Easterby.”

I've excerpted more than enough already. You get the point. But I recommend you read the whole thing because it's an incredible story. How he asked for information about the football operation that his colleagues think he used to undermine them.How he's padded his resume. Possibly spied on players. Straight out of Machiavelli, if not George R.R. Martin. A nobody with no qualifications. A cushy, no pressure job with the best franchise in all of pro sports, just counseling players and keeping everyone feeling like they've got someone to talk to. And in less than two years he's clawed his way into the halls of power, one of only 32 people in the world who can say they're in complete control of a billion-dollar NFL franchise. Unbelievable. And while I've said before I'm always super skeptical of anyone who invokes religion while also desiring the very human pleasures like power, money, fame and prestige. But damn if I don't respect his game. 

Still, the best part of The High Sparrow and Littlefinger's character arcs was seeing the looks on their faces when they got exposed as the conniving frauds they were and then got destroyed. Jack Easterby is on borrowed time. It's just a question of whether he we'll take a football franchise with when he goes too.