Sielski: Roseman's gamble is that Eagles' core players are good enough to win championships
From the moment he joined the Eagles as a front-office intern in 2000, fresh from Fordham Law School, Howie Roseman spent his formative years as an NFL executive helping his mentor usher in a revolution and bearing witness to the bitter fallout.
From the moment he joined the Eagles as a front-office intern in 2000, fresh from Fordham Law School, Howie Roseman spent his formative years as an NFL executive helping his mentor usher in a revolution and bearing witness to the bitter fallout.
As the Eagles' president then, and with Roseman working alongside him, Joe Banner pioneered the two-pronged strategy that became a staple of business in a salary-cap world. The Eagles would sign players whom they perceived to be part of their long-term future to cost-effective contracts, and they would be willing to say goodbye - maybe a little too soon - to some of their most popular, respected, and expensive veterans.
If the approach, combined with the presence of Donovan McNabb, kept the Eagles in championship contention for the better part of a decade, it at times seemed to exact too great a cost. Jeremiah Trotter's departure left a hole at middle linebacker that arguably prevented the 2002-03 Eagles from reaching the Super Bowl. Brian Dawkins' departure left a hole at safety that the team failed to fill for years. And the public perception of the Eagles became that of an organization with ice at its core, that would try to replace irreplaceable players just to save a few bucks.
Roseman was there throughout, working his way to the top of the football-operations department, and he apparently has internalized the lessons of that era. With Chip Kelly gone, with the consent of owner Jeffrey Lurie and head coach Doug Pederson, Roseman this offseason has set himself to mimicking the Eagles' strategy from the early 2000s. The six-year contract to which defensive tackle Fletcher Cox agreed this week was just the latest in Roseman's flurry of spending and maneuvering to establish and preserve the Eagles' nucleus. They've guaranteed more than $280 million in contracts this offseason, by far the most in the league, and much of that money has gone to players who were already here. Six years for Cox and Lane Johnson. Five years for Malcolm Jenkins, Zach Ertz, and Vinny Curry. Three years for Brent Celek.
"When you look at the Giants, the Steelers, the Colts, the Patriots, the Packers, the Seahawks, they have a core group of guys, a big core group of guys that they are building with together," Roseman said Thursday. "They are going through things together. That strengthens your team. That strengthens your bond."
Those teams, though, have an advantage that the Eagles had with McNabb and may or may not have this season and beyond: stability and excellence at quarterback. With those two giant predraft trades, Roseman has gambled that Carson Wentz will provide those qualities. And because the Eagles sacrificed a net of two draft picks to get Wentz, he will have to become one the league's best quarterbacks to justify those moves.
Take next year's draft, for instance: The Eagles could have as many as seven picks, but as of now they'll have none in the first round - their pick belongs to the Cleveland Browns - and just two in the first three rounds. Given Roseman's spotty talent-evaluation record and the Banner-like trend of teams' signing their most promising young players before free agency, the Eagles will have to have a lot go right to assemble an excellent supporting cast around Wentz. So . . .
"How are you getting good players?" Roseman said. "You've got to keep your own. . . . That was part of our calculation."
But how good are the Eagles' own players, the ones they chose to re-sign? It was one thing for Banner and Andy Reid to do all they could to keep the likes of McNabb, Jon Runyan, Tra Thomas, and Brian Westbrook. It may turn out to be another thing for Roseman to build around players who, relative to those franchise fixtures, are less accomplished. No one would question Cox's or Jenkins' credentials. But Celek turned 31 in January. Ertz and Johnson have been good players, not elite ones. Curry has been merely a situational pass rusher - an effective one at times, sure, but nothing more. And all of them were members of a team that collapsed down the stretch in 2014 and went 7-9 in 2015.
How good are these guys if things went so bad while they were here? Was the failure all Kelly's fault? Roseman himself acknowledged Thursday that those questions were fair to ask.
"We're not sitting here and talking about being the '85 Bears that were this dominant team," he said. "But when you look at the teams that are really good teams and have a chance to be great teams, it's because they have a core group of players that they keep together. And when you're changing guys in and out and you're losing good players that you invested draft picks, it's hard to build anything. It's hard to sustain anything, and so we know we have a lot of other areas that we have to improve."
More than anything, Roseman has to hope that much of the Eagles' improvement happens organically, among the men he made sure would never get away. No NFL executive put more resources behind his belief in the power of continuity. No one staked more of his or his team's future on it. This is Howie Roseman's revolution, and he will be responsible for the success, for the fallout, for all of it.
@MikeSielski