Eagles GM Howie Roseman Playing Poker in Draft: 'Nobody Has Any Idea'
PHILADELPHIA – Go ahead. Keep trying to figure out what the Eagles are going to do in the 2023 NFL Draft, which is now at T-minus a week and counting.
Howie Roseman dares you.
Go ahead, do all the mock drafts you want, maybe you’ll be like that farmer who can find a needle in a haystack.
“Nobody has any idea what we're going to do,” said the Philadelphia Eagles GM when he held his pre-draft process at the team facility on Thursday.
“I know that. And so, for me to think that there are actually people in this league talking to people and saying, ‘Hey, I'm going to draft this guy at 10, but don't tell anyone,’ this is a huge game of poker, and all you want to affect is the outcome of your desired results.”
The assembled media tried to pry answers or see if he would leave some unintentional breadcrumbs to help make a more educated guess.
It wasn’t to be.
SI's Eagles Today asked Roseman how many prospects carry first-round grades in his evaluations.
His response?
“Well, since we have two first-round picks I'm not going to tell you how many guys have first-round grades."
Fair enough.
No general manager would ever reveal his intentions no matter how far away the draft is, and Roseman is certainly no different.
“Am I going to give you guys any answers today? No, not even a little bit,” he said. “But I think the reality of it is anyone who's sitting there and saying, hey, I know exactly what's going to happen at pick 11 or pick 12 or pick 6 or 20, it's all a guess.”
The closest he came to leaving a trail was saying that he is looking for a “unique” player in the top 10, regardless of position.
“I think that there are so few unique players in any draft that if you start picking by position and not based on the quality of the talent, then you really get a chance - so if you pick by position and you pick a player who's not any good, then it's not a good pick anyway,” he said.
The definition of unique: being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else.
Perhaps it’s worth exploring if you want to try to crack the Eagles' first-round code.
“I think that if you start saying, ‘Hey, we can only get a unique player, but it's got to be this position,’ you really narrow your options right there,” said Roseman. “So just trying to be as open-minded as possible about what that looks like and making sure that whoever we pick is somebody that we think can really impact the game.”
So, ask yourself, who in this draft is unique?
“I promise you when we come here next Thursday night … you guys will have probably five or six times when the commissioner announces a pick go, whoa, because at the end of the day, everyone sees things differently,” said Roseman. “Just like everyone sees people differently, just like everyone sees food differently.
“The things that we're seeing that we think are so clear and so transparent to another team are totally opposite. That's what makes the draft kind of fun.
"You see things and you go there, and you go, there's no way that everyone is not going to see the first 10 picks exactly how we see them, and there will be a difference of opinion.”
So, good luck figuring out just who the Eagles will take.
Ed Kracz covers the Philadelphia Eagles for SI's EaglesToday.
Please follow him and our Eagles coverage on Twitter at @kracze.
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