Does Howie Roseman Deserve to be in Conversation for Exec of Year?
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It’s a long shot, and the mere suggestion of it will rankle the feathers of most Eagles fans, but general manager Howie Roseman should get some consideration for executive of the year.
And, while I’m at it, Nick Sirianni should be the coach of the year.
Neither coach nor GM will win it, but they need to be in the conversation.
Most, I’m sure would think it’s fine to suggest that Sirianni be under consideration, but Roseman?
Before setting Twitter aflame, hear me out, remembering the bar was set low for this season when owner Jeffrey Lurie called it a “transition” year, with a roster turning over toward youth.
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First, start with the draft.
The Eagles aren’t in the playoffs without the players Roseman brought in last spring. All nine draft picks have contributed, with the greatest impact coming from DeVonta Smith, Landon Dickerson, Milton Williams, and Kenny Gainwell.
Second, there was free agency.
Roseman’s salary cap was out of control at the end of the 2020 season. You could argue that it was a mess he created and he only pushed the pain down the road, but the GM did what he had to in order to be able to sign some players.
Without much money to spend, he signed Jordan Howard, Steve Nelson, and Anthony Harris. None are superstars but they know their roles and have played them about as well as could be expected.
Third, the highest-paid player on the Eagles this season won’t play in Sunday’s playoff game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
He’ll be out hunting or home being a dad to his two daughters, or both, or something else entirely different. Either way, Carson Wentz isn’t playing.
Carson Wentz failed to get the Colts into the playoffs despite having to win only one of their final two games.
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The Eagles took a $33.82 million salary-cap hit this year for their once-QB of the future to play for the Indianapolis Colts, who needed to win only one of their final two games to make the AFC playoffs but lost at home to the Las Vegas Raiders and on the road to the two-win Jacksonville Jaguars.
Now, you could once again take issue with Roseman and Lurie, for extending Wentz in the summer of 2019 then drafting Jalen Hurts in 2020, and it’s hard to argue that point.
However, extending players early after identifying them as franchise players, as they did with Wentz, is the standard operating procedure for most NFL teams, especially at the quarterback position.
There is no way the Eagles could have predicted how quickly Wentz would fall off a cliff, and, as Roseman said to justify drafting Hurts, the team made the postseason three times after drafting him, and the only one he was able to play in came to an end early in the first quarter against Seattle after Jadeveon Clowney's conveniently placed forearm to the back of his head concussed Wentz.
Not many thought the Eagles would absorb the biggest dead money hit in the history of the NFL to part ways with Wentz, but they did, and they made the playoffs, anyway.
Dead money is a salary cap charge for a player that is no longer on a team's roster, and the Eagles had the second biggest dead money this season at $63.7 million behind only the Lions ($66.8M).
The team with the next highest dead cap hit to make the playoffs are the Rams at $48.9M followed by the Raiders at $36.2. The defending Super Bowl champion Bucs, in comparison, have just $7.050M in dead money.
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Finally, Roseman finagled a pair of first-round picks in 2022 from two other teams.
Those picks were locked in after the regular season ended on Sunday.
The Eagles will use Miami’s pick at No. 15, the one Roseman acquired in trading back six spots, from No. 6 to No. 12 last spring, and Indy’s pick at No. 16, the one that had been a conditional second but grew to a first when Wentz met the prerequisite snaps set forth in the trade.
And, oh, by the way, Roseman also got Indy’s third-round selection last year.
Right now, the Eagles also have their own pick, which sits at No. 19. If they beat the Bucs this weekend, that pick will drop into the 20s.
So, really, it’s been a win-win for the Eagles this year.
They made the playoffs with their highest-paid player playing somewhere else, with a potentially suffocating dead cap hit, and own three picks in the 2022 NFL Draft.
Like it or not, that is executive of the year type qualifications.
Ed Kracz is the publisher of SI.com’s Eagle Maven and co-host of the Eagles Unfiltered Podcast. Check out the latest Eagles news at www.SI.com/NFL/Eagles or www.eaglemaven.com and please follow him on Twitter: @kracze.
