Roseman vows to remain aggressive in free agency
INDIANAPOLIS — Just because his Philadelphia Eagles entered this offseason as the team with the worst salary cap flexibility in the NFL, according to overthecap.com, it won’t mean a change in team-building philosophy, executive vice president of football operations Howie Roseman said Wednesday.
Speaking at the NFL Scouting Combine, Roseman vowed he would do whatever it takes within reason to improve the team, even if it means spending money they’re not thought to be allowed to spend.
Essentially, he all but guaranteed he’d be able to create enough precious cap space for the Eagles to get who they really need.
“I expect us always to be aggressive in every aspect,” he said. “That’s kind of who we are. With that, obviously there come risks, but we’re not going to be risk-averse. If there’s an opportunity to improve our football team, we’ll do that. But we’re not going to use the cap as an excuse.
“But we’re also going to try to be smart about it.”
Whether that means they would be interested in, say, potential free-agent running back Le’Veon Bell, who will command a premium price, is unclear — especially with a complicated second contract negotiation coming up that could make quarterback Carson Wentz the highest-paid player in league history.
“You have to plan knowing you have an extremely talented quarterback,” Roseman said. “But by the same token, there are going to be opportunities to improve our team, even taking that [next contract] into account.”
Though not ready to commit to left tackle Jason Peters for another year, Roseman was clear that normal rules aren’t applicable in his case.
“He’s not a normal human being,” Roseman gushed. “He’s freaky. He’s a first-ballot Hall of Famer as a player and as a person. So normal rules don’t apply when it comes to Jason.”
Roseman also admitted that emotion will play a part in some of these hard decisions over the next few months.
“The hardest thing we have to do is separate the emotion from it,” he said. “Quite frankly, we’re an organization led by our owner [Jeffrey Lurie] and led by our head coach [Doug Pederson] that emotion plays a part in some of the decisions we make. We get attached to our players because they do so much for us. I don’t know that that ever is going to go away as long as this leadership is in place. We try to balance those things, but it’s hard. It’s hard.
“In this day and age, it’s hard also for guys to spend their whole careers with one team. There is a lot of player movement. But I can tell you, with all of the evaluation that we do, at the end of the day, those things don’t matter.”
Roseman has had the most success in free agency with second-tier players he was able to attain without major expenditures. He talked about the benefits of that approach.
“When you’re talking about the top guys, you’re bidding against 20-25 teams,” Roseman said. “At the step below, you’re bidding against five or six. It’s just hard to stay in that ballgame because we have a lot of players on long-term contracts that are making good money. It’s hard to be in a situation where we’re going to be the highest bidder for the top free agent. And that’s not really how we want to build a team. We want to give our own top players top-of-the-market deals and then look to free agency to kind of supplement that.”
Finally, Roseman said of new vice president of player personnel Andrew Berry that “we’ve had our eye on him for a long time.”
Exactly what Berry will do remains unclear, but “there’s a lot that goes on,” Roseman said. “Obviously, the most important thing is improving our roster and making sure we have the right players. He’ll be a part of that. But also looking at decisionmaking and every area of football ops. That’s the performance area. That’s innovation in video. I can go on and on.
“The job is multi-faceted. There’s a lot of time that we spend doing more than just improving the roster. And he can help in every area. He’s very versatile.”