This time, no reason to go all-in
PHILADELPHIA >> Andy MacPhail put it into words, words that were taken out of context, but words that would stick to him as long has he presided over a majorleague team on Pattison Ave.
“If we don’t,” the Phillies’ president shrugged, around the trade deadline, “we don’t.”
His point, give or take a nuance, was that the Phillies were not prepared to overspend just to win a low-seed playoff spot. So if they didn’t reach the postseason, they didn’t. But he later realized that, even if his concept was solid, there was no reason to slam it into a slogan. Actions always say more anyway.
That’s what the team president across the street from Citizens Bank Park did the other day. Howie Roseman let his actions do exactly what Andy MacPhail had done four months earlier, except that he saved himself the inconvenience of being made to sound disinterested. He examined the Eagles’ situation as the NFL trade deadline neared and chose to withdraw from the bidding for Jalen Ramsey.
The Eagles are desperate for cornerback help, particularly after a lopsided loss in Minnesota where Kirk Cousins kept finding receivers open for lengthy touchdown passes, and Roseman was known to have dabbled in the auction for Ramsey, a self-centered, in-house irritant no longer interested in working for the Jacksonville Jaguars. Twice a Pro Bowl corner, and only at the age of 24, the former fifth-overall pick in the draft would go instead to the Los Angeles Rams. The price: A 2020 first-round pick, a 2021 first-round choice and a 2021 fourth-round selection.
That was too much for the Eagles, who instead have tried this week to couch the recoveries of Ronald Darby and Jalen Mills from injury as a sufficient boost to their soggy secondary.
“There is no disappointment,” Doug Pederson would say. “I’m happy for the Rams obviously. He’ll be a great addition. We’re getting guys back, too, on our team, and I’m excited about the guys we have coming back and getting in the mix. We’re starting to get healthy as well, so that’s the encouraging part from our side.”
That’s what Pederson said. But what Roseman didn’t say by backing away from the Ramsey opportunity was more likely to resonate. It was this: He didn’t think a .500 football team in the seventh week of a 17-week season was close enough to true contention to risk severe damage to his next two drafts.
The designer of a Super Bowl championship team just two seasons ago, Roseman remains in a position where his decisions must be respected. And given that Ramsey was the player who earlier this season wound up in a physical altercation with Jags’ coach Doug Marrone and demanded a trade, Roseman had reason to resist spending so heavily for such a potential problem. Yet for a franchise that has dominated the sportschannel tickers for years with its willingness to add Terrell Owens and Michael Vick and Tim Tebow and Mark Sanchez and every other A-list character available, it was a slight departure from policy. The question: Why?
The answer: Because the Eagles have not given the front office any reason to believe anything but that they are a 3-3 team on merit. As Charlie Manuel once famously boasted after the Phillies finally had climbed out of an early hole to earn a .500 record, “It feels good. And we’re going to stay there, too.”
Though the Eagles had themselves and others convinced that 2019 would be a 2017 after-shock and that they’d accumulated enough good players to soon send Jason Kelce rummaging through his Mummers outfits for appropriate parade-wear, they have demonstrated nothing other than that they are an ordinary football team. They will hint, and their most loyal fans will wail, that they have been victimized by dropped passes and injuries. Yet that’s exactly how .500 teams happen; they find themselves reliant on players just good enough to disappoint. Ordinary teams drop passes. Ordinary teams are caught two steps behind in the secondary. Ordinary teams don’t have enough depth to overcome injuries. Ordinary teams will occasionally tease, as the Eagles did, winning in a showcase game at Green Bay with 11th-hour heroics. But ordinary teams do not inspire their front offices to go all-in on available stars at the trade deadline.
The Eagles are in a horrifying scheduling stretch where they will play three consecutive road games, having been willing to clear out of the stadium complex to save parking spaces for, pardon the expression, the World Series. They lost the first in Minnesota, and have an interesting test Sunday night in Dallas. Only slight underdogs, they will have a reasonable chance to win and take over first place in the NFC East. But they will be in Buffalo the following week. So it’s reasonable to see them at 4-4 before their Nov. 3 home game against Chicago.
At some point, DeSean Jackson, who was not spotted at practice Thursday, will return from a slow-to-heal abdominal injury. Mills and Darby will be slight upgrades for a secondary that could not have played much worse against the Vikings. And the back end of the schedule, with four of their last five being against teams that almost appear to be tanking, could allow the Eagles to win their cheap division and whatever postseason bid that will provide.
But one of the last two NFC Super Bowl teams will play with Jalen Ramsey, hoping he will not become destructive, and it will worry later about the damage it might do to its future drafts. The other? It won’t.
It doesn’t mean the Eagles won’t make the playoffs. But if they don’t, they don’t.
To contact Jack McCaffery, email him at jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @JackMcCaffery