How Chris Kuper Knew Sean Mannion Was Destined To Be A Coach

How Chris Kuper knew Sean Mannion was destined to be a coach originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia

Chris Kuper didn’t spend a ton of time with Sean Mannion when the two were in Minnesota together. 

He didn’t need to.

Even their minimal interactions showed Kuper that Mannion would be a fast-rising coach before too long. A few years later, Kuper and Mannion have been reunited on the Eagles’ staff.

“Sean’s one of those guys that surprised me,” said Kuper, who is now serving as the offensive line coach under Mannion in Philly. “Because there’s not a ton of interaction with the backup quarterback, but he would ask me some protection questions to really get in front of them for Kirk (Cousins) because he knew that Kirk was going to ask him. So then you start to see like, ‘All right, this guy’s a high level backup in terms of knowing what the role is.’

“There’s other backups that maybe thinking they’re going to compete for the job, which Sean was that guy back when he started out. He really fell into a role and then he maximized that role. And so I saw a little bit of evolution of like, ‘Holy smokes, that’s what a backup quarterback is doing for a starter.’”

Mannion, 34, had a bunch of stops in his nine-year NFL playing career before he was hired by Matt LaFleur to join the Packers’ staff the last two years. Mannion was an offensive assistant in 2024 and a quarterbacks coach in 2025 before getting hired away by the Eagles as offensive coordinator. During his time in the NFL, Mannion has been around a bunch of great coaches like LaFleur, Sean McVay, Kevin O’Connell, Dave Canales, Gary Kubiak, Klint Kubiak and more.

And the whole time, he was thinking and collecting for the day he’d run his own offense.

“I mean, Sean has his own playbook while he was a backup quarterback in Minnesota,” Kuper said.

Like an actual book?

“He had a true binder full of plays that he was kind of deciding whether his offense was going to be a part of this or not,” Kuper said. “And he’s evolved from there. So yeah, I figured he had an inkling that maybe it might be something he wants to do. Now we’re seeing it here.”

There are obviously certain staples of this brand of offense and we can expect to see them in Philly this season. But the Eagles have different players than the Packers or the 49ers or the Rams. And Mannion is a different coach than LaFleur or Shanahan or McVay or anyone else who runs this system.

So it’s going to be fun to see what he comes up with in 2026.

“This is football,” Kuper said. “I can call it an apple and someone else can call it an orange. We might be running the same thing, saying it a different way. But if you cut on the tape, there’s no sound on the tape. So you cut on the tape, it looks the same. Just a different way of presenting it. So again, for us, it’s learning his verbiage too, the way that he wants to call things and the way that he wants to run, throw the ball, protect, all those things.”

The Eagles didn’t just hire Mannion and force the rest of their coaches on him. Mannion got to pick some of his staff, including run game coordinator Ryan Mahaffey and Kuper. Kuper has familiarity with this scheme as well as familiarity with Mannion.

While Kuper always thought Mannion would make a good coach one day, he’s getting to see it for himself this spring. And there are things he just couldn’t see a few years ago.

“I really love his demeanor,” Kuper said. “And then the thing that I didn’t get to see, because I was a coach and he was a backup quarterback, is his ability to lead. And lead men and lead coaches. He hasn’t been doing this a long time, but he’s an organized person, he knows what he wants and he’s very clear and concise. So the job description, is very black and white, which is what we all want. That’s what the players want, so that we can present them with something that is black and white.”