Free Agency Flash And Splash Not Part Of Howie Roseman's Plan For Eagles

PHILADELPHIA - The Eagles are OK with not winning the free agency. It’s probably the only time they don’t mind losing. It’s not the way general manager Howie Roseman likes to build a team, so let other teams win free agency.

It's hard to argue against Roseman's plan, with two Super Bowl titles and three trips to the big game in the last nine years. Roseman’s plan is working well right now. And that plan?

“I think from a big picture perspective, we want to build a team that every year has a chance to compete for championships, that drafts really well and signs their own players and just sporadically goes into free agency," he said, during a pre-Scouting Combine gathering with the team’s beat reporters last Friday.

“That's what we're trying to do. And sometimes as much as you want to add from outside and you want to change it up, you've got to make a decision to keep the players you know have played well and are part of your culture.”

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So, forget any big-time splash moves when the legal tampering for free agency begins on March 9, 48 hours before the official start of the league’s new year on March 11 at 4 p.m. That doesn't mean we won't see a series of one-year deals for "outsiders," like the ones Roseman got done last year.

It's just that A big part of Roseman’s plan is drafting well. And after some stops and starts early in his tenure, he and his staff of scouts, in conjunction with input from owner Jeffrey Lurie, have been one of the best at doing it.

Howie Roseman's Plan Is To Draft Well And Keep Who He Can

Dating back to Jordan Mailata, who was picked in the seventh round of the 2018 draft, Roseman has mined some gold in later rounds. In just the last five drafts, he has taken players such as Moro Ojomo in the seventh, Tanner McKee and Grant Calcaterra in the sixth, Kenny Gainwell in the fifth. The GM took unheralded Jalyx Hunt in the third, and Quinyon Mitchell (23rd overall) and Cooper DeJean (40th, after trading up) with back-to-back picks.

He’s also nailed first-round selections of DeVonta Smith, Jordan Davis, Jalen Carter, and it looks like Jihaad Campbell is trending in the right direction.

Now comes perhaps an even more difficult part of the plan – signing players they have drafted and developed. With so many of those players coming due for new deals the next couple of years, the Eagles cannot afford to go all willy-nilly in free agency.

"Can we keep all our guys, considering we have, for example, a lot of key defensive players coming off rookie deals in the next few years? No, we are going to have to make choices," said Roseman. "For us to sign them, that's gonna limit some flexibility with outside players. So, then you combine that with the fact that teams, because there's more cap room, because the cap has gone up, teams have done a great job of signing their own players.

And so you can, you know, just shuffle deck chairs, right, and just say ‘hey, I'm gonna trade out this guy because he's not ours,’ and maybe it's a Better PR move that, ‘hey, we're active' look they signed this guy,' but that means we're gonna have to get rid of one of our own guys, and so everything we do at this point is a trade-off. If we do this, we're gonna have to get rid of that. But I think that... that's the right way really to build teams here to draft, develop, re-sign."

Here are the Eagles’ free agents:

Offense: TE Dallas Goedert, WR Jahan Dotson, OT Fred Johnson, OL Brett Toth, TE Grant Calcaterra, TE Kylen Granson, OL Matt Pryor, QB Sam Howell, RB A.J. Dillon, FB Ben VanSumeren (RFA)

Defense: LB Nakobe Dean, OLB Jaelan Phillips, S Reed Blankenship, S Marcus Epps, CB Adoree’ Jackson, DE Brandon Graham, OLB Joshua Uche, OLB Azeez Ojulari, OLB Ogbo Okoronkwo, P Braden Mann.

The Eagles could prioritize several of them at the expense of others on the free agent market.

“I know that's not flashy,” said Roseman. “I do like splash. That doesn't mean that we can't do splashy things, but from a broad perspective, if we can keep our players, if we can keep a lot of these young, really good players that we know that we live with, so we know who they are as people, and then it's like a cake, it's like a layer cake. Then you build on top of it with more good draft picks and more good young players, and then the cycle starts again.”

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