Makai Lemon has all of the opportunity in the world. The Eagles need him to seize it.
A.J. Brown's departure gives the Eagles' first-round draft choice an excellent opportunity to make Sean Mannion's new offense work.
There is a piece of math that makes it awfully difficult to assume anything about Sean Mannion’s offense.
It’s a piece of math that is either working in strong favor of or in strong disfavor of Makai Lemon. It all depends on how the rookie feels about pressure.
The expectations for the Eagles’ 2026 first-round pick should be a lot higher than they currently are. Because the bar is high. And he is the only one who has the skill set to clear it.
Let’s start with the math. Specifically, with the number 143. That’s how many targets A.J. Brown averaged per 17 games during his four years with the Eagles.
Add to that the number 35, also known as the number of targets that Jahan Dotson averaged per 17 games in his two years with the Eagles.
Our total is 178.
Which brings us to the most critical number: 60.
That’s how many targets Dontayvion Wicks has averaged per 17 games in three NFL seasons.
As the signs will say in London in Week 5: Mind the Gap!
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One thing you can say with high certainty about the Eagles offense in its first year under Mannion: either some wide receiver is going to have a breakout season, or the defense is going to need to win them a lot of games.
The other options are all outliers. Even if the offensive line recaptures the bodily spirit of 2024, are the Eagles really going to be able to average five yards per carry without somebody drawing A.J. Brown’s level of gravity opposite DeVonta Smith? If not, are they really going to be able to run the ball 621 times while passing it only 448? If not, are the Eagles really going to be able to put up championship-caliber point totals with Smith accounting for a third of the targets and yards?
The breakout certainly could be Smith’s to have. There are plenty of folks inside and outside of the Eagles organization who have murmured the names Jaxon Smith-Njigba and D.K. Metcalf when hypothesizing about the Eagles’ Smith in his post-Brown chapter. Last season, after the Seahawks traded Metcalf to the Steelers, Smith-Njigba’s target share jumped from 137 to 163 and his yardage from 1,130 to 1,793. In other words, he turned from DeVonta Smith into a supersized A.J. Brown.
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In the event of such a breakout from Smith, the Eagles wouldn’t necessarily need anything greater than replacement-level production from the rest of the Eagles’ receiving corps. Last season, the only Seahawks receiver other than Smith-Njigba with more than 26 targets or 188 yards was the ghost of Cooper Kupp, who finished with 47 catches and 593 yards.
But, like we said, that’s an outlier sort of thing.
One can argue that the Broncos, Bills and Chiefs offer alternate hypotheticals for life without a true No. 2.
Denver made it to last year’s AFC Championship game with Troy Franklin’s 65 catches and 709 yards in the second chair behind Courtland Sutton’s 74 and 1,017.
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The Bills had the second-highest scoring offense in the NFL in 2024 with Khalil Shakir leading the way at 100 targets and 821 yards. That was the year after they parted ways with Stefon Diggs.
The Chiefs had the NFL’s highest scoring offense in 2022, the year after they traded away Tyreek Hill. Their top wide receiver was JuJu Smith-Schuster, who had 101 targets and 933 yards.
The rebuttals are easy.
The Chiefs had Travis Kelce, who filled the Hill vacuum with a career-high 152 targets, 110 catches and 1,338 yards. If Dallas Goedert does that, great. He’s the breakout. Otherwise, Smith-Schuster’s 933 yards would be a heck of a season for Lemon or Wicks.
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The Broncos and Bills both traded significant draft capital for wide receivers this offseason, with Jaylen Waddle heading to Denver from Miami and D.J. Moore going to Buffalo from Chicago. Both served as verdicts on a by-committee approach at wide receiver.
There’s a lot we don’t know about Mannion and how his scheme will express itself. There’s even more we do not know about how Jalen Hurts and the rest of the Eagles’ talent will play without a generational wide receiver on one side of the field and Smith on the other.
But we can venture to say that nobody besides Lemon or Smith has the potential to maintain the Eagles’ aggregate WR1/WR2 production at a level where it needs to be. Ours is not the first fan base or media contingent to sell themselves on best-case scenarios for Wicks, Marquise Brown, or Elijah Moore. Those players are here for a reason. Their sample sizes are more than large enough.
That’s one of two reasons why Lemon is the player most integral to the Eagles’ 2026 hopes. The second is that he has the ability.
The Eagles traded up a spot and snaked the Steelers for a reason. He isn’t your typical late-first-round wide receiver. There is plenty of maturity and present day NFL value evident in his game tape. He doesn’t have the outlier physical or athletic measurable of a potential generational performer like Brown. But he has the technical skills and toughness that play immediately in the NFL.
We have not heard much of Lemon this last month. Summer-long soft tissue injuries have a knack of doing that to rookies. The big question is whether the time he has lost is time that cannot quickly be regained.
That’s true for Lemon individually. It’s just as true for the Eagles’ offense as a whole.
The Eagles’ first-stringers get little to no action in exhibition games, annual joint practices with other teams become one of the few opportunities for starters to get preseason reps of consequence. This year, the Eagles traveled to New England for two days of live workouts with the Patriots. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeff McLane and Boston Sports Journal’s Greg A. Bedard recap what they saw, and explain why, even after the joint practices, the Eagles still haven’t shown much of an identity. Listen here.
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