Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Roseman has executed functional offseason plan
There was the fourth quarter of the final regular-season game and the head coach deciding that winning was secondary to readying a third-string quarterback.
There was sorry, muffled rationalization that the loss was the best way to ensure the everimportant No. 6 overall draft pick.
There was the fallout, Eagles alumni screaming in horror, Miles Sanders, their best young player, letting it known of the resentment in the room.
There was the firing of Doug Pederson, who’d won a Super Bowl three seasons prior. There were the scrambled messages of why that had to be done, the owner never really clear.
There was the search for a new on-field leader and an odd commitment to a 39-year-old who had never coached a football game. There was the horrifying press conference that followed, Nick Sirianni roundly unable to answer a question without a look of terror. His quarterback? How would he know?
There was Carson Wentz, once considered the franchise quarterback for life, choosing not to utter one postseason public peep. There was the trade of Wentz to Sirianni’s former employer, the Colts.
Finally, there was the roll-up to the draft, with Sirianni confessing that he played rock-paper-scissors over Zoom calls with prospective picks in an effort to measure their competitive streaks.
To the audience, it was banana-peel-slip-a-minute comedy.
And, yes, that was rock-paperscissors the man played.
For all of that, and because the Eagles had the audacity to have their first losing season since winning the whole bloody thing in 2017-18, the front office was characterized as dysfunctional. That’s the one-size-fitsall, early 21st century social media sports insult, popular in the critic-culture.
Yet Howie Roseman deserved better.
And Jeffrey Lurie deserved better.
And Nick Sirianni … well, he doesn’t deserve anything yet. But if he can count to two when it’s time to order the point-after team onto the field, he’ll be a sideline upgrade.
By Thursday, that renewed appreciation of the front office had begun, as every one of those skits conspired to land the Eagles the one recruit they most wanted, receiver DeVonta Smith from Alabama. Ta-da? “With the amount of picks we had, the flexibility we had because of the picks,” Roseman said, “we made the trade up.”
As usual, there is zero value to receiving any “A-plus” grades from self-appointed football draft professors. And it is absurd to use the over-sold NFL Draft TV show for any more than late-spring entertainment. The idea is to win games, not praise for selecting players that almost everyone agrees were good in college anyway. And the Eagles have won games at more than a satisfactory pace under Lurie and Roseman.
Yet for that task Roseman undertook since that 4-11-1 disaster of a 2020 season, and through all the contortions that led him to Thursday, the outrageous Eagles offseason finally began to gain clarity.
With a new, offensive-minded coach, and with a young quarterback in Jalen Hurts, the Eagles needed a point-producer. They felt Smith would best fit that description in the draft, and correctly calculated that they didn’t need to stay at No. 6 to obtain his rights.
So Roseman traded down for the No. 12 pick, stealing a 2022 first-round pick from the Dolphins in the process. And as he offloaded the turnover-prone and eternally brittle Wentz to Indianapolis, he pulled in a handy third-round pick. With Smith still available at No. 10, Roseman was able to send that No. 12 pick and that third-round token to Dallas, jump ahead of the Giants and select the Heisman Trophy winner.
If the Eagles didn’t lose that last game, they wouldn’t have had that sixth pick.
If they didn’t have the sixth pick, they couldn’t have traded it for the 12th.
If they didn’t have the 12th and the third-round pick in the Wentz bargain, they couldn’t have traded up to No. 10.
And if they didn’t trade up to No. 10, they couldn’t have secured Smith. Don’t try this at home? “From March to Draft Day,” Roseman said, “a lot has changed.”
Smith is small, plays big, all that standard post-draft babble. If he helps the Eagles win championships, he will see his number retired. If he drops two passes in the preseason game against the Jets, somebody will call him Nelson Agholor. Rules are rules. All that mattered Thursday was that Roseman’s plan worked. He wound up with a celebrated receiver to go with a young coach and quarterback, and an additional first-round pick. Brilliant. One more thing, though. They should have tried to win that Week 17 game. Any rock-paperscissors competitor would know that.