Eagles Deal with Fallout of no Preseason as Roster Decisions Reach Crunch Time

PHILADELPHIA – As the Eagles mull their remaining roster decisions, the lack of preseason games is an issue when it comes time to making proper evaluations for various players.

After Thursday’s cuts totaling a dozen players, the Eagles still had 14 more to trim, and no game action against other teams is available from which to add to the evaluation process after all four summer exhibitions were canceled.

Obviously, every team is affected by this, not just the Eagles.

“I tell you, from a coaching side of it, not having pre-season games, I would tell you it's difficult to really evaluate these guys and really see them in game situations,” said head coach Doug Pederson on Tuesday, the last day he was available to talk with reporters. “It's probably been the hardest thing this camp.

“We've seen probably enough from him to understand who he is and the type of player he is. We like him. At the same time, it's just a matter of missing games. That evaluation process goes a long way.”

"Him" is Adrian Killins because this was Pederson’s response to a question about the undrafted free agent running back, who was one of the 12 players released on Thursday, that led to that answer.

The coach is right, though. The evaluations of players they are unfamiliar with, in the heat of battle, so to speak, mainly rookies and UDFAs, is challenging.

Players can often times look like Hall of Famers in practice, but when the lights go on in the big stadium and fans are there casting judgments, performance can sometimes crumble.

Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz has seen it happen many times.

“Whenever we have rookies, in particular, they always start off, they're overwhelmed, and then they come back, they seem like they got it,” said Schwartz. “Then we have the open practice at the Linc and there would be 40,000 people over there singing Fly Eagles Fly. Those guys would sort of go to pieces.

“Things that a couple days ago they had mastered, all of a sudden they would blow circuits because it was their first exposure to that kind of environment. Same as the first pre-season game.”

Eventually, he said, those players settle down, revert to their training and begin to block out that so-called noise.

Now, there won’t be fans in many stadiums for at least the first month of the season, possibly even all season long. But even that didn’t seem to matter to some of the Eagles’ rookies after they practiced at Lincoln Financial Field for the first time on Sunday – a stadium without fans and only piped in artificial crowd noise.

“There is that little bit of uncertainty because even when we did go over to Linc, and we did see some of that stuff that guys had stone-cold a couple days before, we had some missed assignments over at the Linc,” said Schwartz. “Even when there were no fans, we saw that.

“Now we don't have pre-season games. Even though we had a lot of time to evaluate, you're still missing that, okay what about the real bullets flying and how is this player going to react to that? Is he ready for that? Those are things we're just going to have to go with practice film and instincts and experience to evaluate.”

Special team coach Dave Fipp said that he has dived into more college tape than in previous years to see what some of his potential core special teamers’ strengths and weaknesses are, or to just check to confirm what he is seeing during practice is what a player did in college.

“Maybe in a normal year, you go off more of - I know I've seen him with us and under what we're asking him to do, I would say maybe for me this year, maybe going back a little bit more to that college stuff where he’s actually playing a game to kind of double-check the things I’m seeing on the practice field and does that match up with what he's done in the past,” said Fipp earlier this month.

“Now that being said, you're also trying to give these guys kind of a clean slate, so you want to bring a guy in here, teach him what you're teaching them and ask him to do it how you want him to do it and not hold what he did in college against him necessarily. I would say it's a balance of both, but I would definitely tell you that I've looked back at the college film more this year than normal.”

Whatever the approach, the reality of no preseason tape to view is a challenge, and one the Eagles and other teams are no doubt doing their best to overcome when it comes time to identify the best 53 players for their rosters.

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