Feels Like When Not If With A.J. Brown And The Eagles

With the new NFL league year approaching, the smoke around A.J. Brown and a potential trade has grown thicker.

Feb 24, 2026; Indianapolis, IN, USA; Philadelphia Eagles general manager Howie Roseman speaks at the NFL Scouting Combine at the Indiana Convention Center. | Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

You know Howie Roseman’s narrative by now. The Eagles aren’t in the business of giving up great players like A.J. Brown, but it’s the GM’s job to listen.

It’s a nice spin, but it’s an unserious one, taking on water with the NFL’s new league year rapidly approaching.

There’s way too much smoke around the Brown situation to be anything other than substantive. 

The idea that other personnel executives are reading things incorrectly, musing out of the blue, ‘Let’s try to pry the three-time second-team All-Pro from Philadelphia,’ is a silly premise to start from. 

And that pales in comparison to the sentiment that Roseman is just an innocent bystander with the mindset of trading anyone only if you “blow him away.”

You not only don’t deal star players on a Hall of Fame-trajectory in the prime of their careers with a dead-money hit of $43,448,704 and a salary-cap penalty of $20,055,206, but you also don’t even think about it unless there is reason to. 

Signs Point To The End

Eagles superstar WR A.J. Brown during 2025 minicamp. | John McMullen/Eagles On SI

A full stop follows that period and no other conversation is needed.

Brown has not been shy to express his frustration with the team’s offensive approach and the Eagles were tired enough of the wideout’s online critiques last season that Jeffrey Lurie stepped in at one point to ask Brown to temper things.  

The confirmation that Roseman is picking up the phone and listening to questions on what it would take to get Brown from New England, Baltimore, Buffalo, the LA Chargers, and the LA Rams (the Eagles aren’t trading Brown in the NFC to another real contender) is the only admission you need that at least one side of this equation, and perhaps both sides, want out of this relationship.

And that means we’ve reached the countdown to Brown’s final days in Philadelphia.

Whether that’s counted in the hours left before the new league year beginning on March 11, the weeks until the NFL Draft, the months until the in-season trade deadline, or the year until the doorstep of next spring, when it would be far more palatable to deal Brown from a business perspective, is up to the notoriously stubborn Roseman.

Everything is pointing to Brown wanting a new start, preferably with the Patriots, and the Eagles trying to male the most of an untenable situation with the measuring to Mike Tomlin's sage words: "You want volunteers, not hostages."