DeVonta Smith won’t replace A.J. Brown. The question is whether the Eagles will need him to.
The question isn’t even whether DeVonta Smith can be a legitimate go-target who serves as a safety blanket for the quarterback. The question is whether the Eagles need such a thing.
DeVonta Smith will be the Eagles’ WR1.
But will he be a WR1?
It’s not just a question.
It’s the question. For the Eagles. For Jalen Hurts. For Sean Mannion. For Nick Sirianni. As of Monday morning, the Eagles are presumably hours or days away from trading away the only legitimate WR1 they’ve had since Terrell Owens body sculpted on the blacktop. A remarkable number of fates hinge on where the Eagles’ passing game goes from here.
There will be no replacing A.J. Brown. Get that straight. Anybody who thinks otherwise is engaging in what the kids call “cope.” Brown is a unicorn, the kind of physical talent that rarely comes around twice in a quarterback’s career. Owens was one. Randy Moss was one. Julio Jones, Justin Jefferson, CeeDee Lamb, etc. Size, strength, body control, burst. Every NFL general manager is chasing that dragon.
» READ MORE: What could the Eagles get back in an A.J. Brown trade? We outlined three possibilities.
Howie Roseman somehow landed one for a mid-first-round pick and a third-rounder even after the other 31 teams had seen Brown play for three seasons. All you need to know about the Eagles’ acquisition of him from the Titans in 2022 is that Roseman could end up trading him for more than he paid to get him when he was in the early stages of his prime.
You shouldn’t need statistics after watching Brown for four years. But they are more than worth reciting. He, Jefferson, and Tyreek Hill are the only three active wide receivers to average at least 9.7 yards per target on 800-plus targets. George Kittle has done it at tight end. Together, they would be four of only nine players in NFL history to finish their careers with 800-plus targets and 9.4 yards per target.
Jefferson and DeSean Jackson are the only two who have not played in a Super Bowl. Any way you slice and dice the data, Brown has been one of the four or five most productive receivers in the NFL since joining the Eagles, despite playing in an offense that has thrown it less frequently than practically anybody.
The question, then, isn’t whether DeVonta Smith can do the exact things that Brown has done. The question isn’t even whether Smith can be who Brown was in abstract: a legitimate go-to target who serves as both a safety blanket for the quarterback and a pressure-release valve for everyone else on the field. The question is whether the Eagles need such a thing.
It is a difficult question to answer. Hurts’ ascendance to a legitimate NFL starter and the Eagles’ ascendance to a legitimate NFL offense both coincided with Brown’s arrival. We have not seen the alternative. Hurts and Smith were both in their first year as NFL starters back in 2021 when the latter caught 64 passes on 104 targets for 916 yards. It would be silly to assign any degree of relevance to that lone season.
As far as evidence goes, the best I could do was to look at the rare and scattered instances when Brown has not been on the field over the last couple of seasons. Using the NFL’s play-by-play participation logs, I crunched the numbers and compared the Eagles’ offense with Brown and Smith on the field to the offense with Smith alone on the field.
This ham-handed study is nowhere near conclusive. Over the last two years, the Eagles have attempted just 119 passes with Smith on the field alone versus 710 with Brown/Smith together (not including meaningless Week 18 games). The sample size is way too small and situationally dependent to render anything definitive.
That said ...
Last year, Hurts was nearly 20% less effective with Brown off the field and Smith on it. With Smith/Brown, the Eagles averaged 6.77 yards per pass attempt. With Smith alone, it averaged 5.51. Over the last two years combined, the Eagles have averaged 7.07 YPA with Smith/Brown and 6.34 with Smith alone.
Over the last two years, Smith has been targeted on 38 of the Eagles’ throws when Brown wasn’t on the field. That’s a huge 32% target share. Across the NFL in 2025, only three receivers eclipsed that percentage: Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Garrett Wilson, and Ja’Marr Chase.
On the other hand ...
Smith turned far fewer of those targets into receptions compared with those he saw when Brown was on the field. Over the last two years, he caught an excellent 73.5% of his passes when sharing the field with Brown. With Brown off the field, he caught 23 of 38, or 60.5%. That’s well below his career 69.5% catch rate. It’s also below Brown’s 65.1% catch rate in his four years as an Eagle.
When Brown was off the field in 2024-25, one out of every five Eagles passes resulted in a Smith catch (19.3%), compared to 16.8% when Brown was on the field. That’s a modest bump, but hardly career-changing. In 2025, it would have meant catching 95 passes, the same number he had in 2022 in Brown’s first season with the team. And that’s if Smith was on the field for every single one of the Eagles’ pass attempts.
Don’t get me wrong. Smith’s numbers are a good bet to improve, maybe even to career highs. The offense is new. It will be built with the idea that Smith is their WR1. But the math only really matters if you are looking at the numbers from an individual standpoint.
Smith is a safe bet to see career highs across all categories. He may very well finish with numbers that establish him as a bona fide WR1. Great news for your fantasy football team if you have Smith as a keeper. But improved individual production doesn’t necessarily equal improved team production.
None of this is meant to imply that the Eagles are making the wrong decision. We’d end up having this conversation at some point. WR1s don’t stay WR1s forever. The end comes quick. Julio Jones had long crossed the line by the time he made his brief cameo as an Eagle. You’d rather be a year or two early than a year or two late if you end up getting a first-round pick in return.
The Eagles have done as good a job as they possibly could do in their first crack at rebuilding the receiver room. Makai Lemon has a chance to be a good one. By the end of 2026, Hurts could have as good a pair of wide receivers as an NFL quarterback needs to thrive.
The big question is whether he needs more than that.
