6 Eagles who won't be on the roster by Week 1

We’re a week away from Tuesday, August 26, the date by which every team has to cut its roster down from 90 guys to 53. Every coach and every general manager that’s ever been asked about it says it’s the worst part of the job. Luckily for them, they’re paid huge amounts of money to do it. 

For us on the outside? We get to make projections based on what we’ve seen, what’s been reported and what we know about the Philadelphia Eagles’ roster-building tendencies. We don’t get millions of dollars for doing it, but we also don’t have any moral, ethical, emotional or social repercussions. It’s a decent trade-off.

It’s been a long summer for a handful of Eagles

This is about the Eagles' 53-man roster, not the practice squad. Some of these guys may get cut and make it back on that roster, but it’s hard to say which guys will get poached by other teams after they initially get cut. 

Also, this is about higher-profile guys. Giles Jackson won’t make the final roster, but with all due respect, you probably don’t know a whole lot about the 2020 second-team All-Big Ten wide receiver, because why would you? These are six unlucky guys who won’t make it onto the roster of the reigning Super Bowl championship team. 

S Lewis Cine

The Eagles signed safety Lewis Cine off the Bills' practice squad on Jan. 8. They then kept him on their active roster during the rest of the postseason but made him inactive during games. If you’re holding a roster spot for a guy during the most important games of the year, when usable depth could mean the end of a dream season, that means you must like something about him. 

Well, no one has heard a peep from him during training camp. He had a decent number of snaps during the first preseason game, but then he started dealing with a groin injury that took him out of practice last week and eventually the second preseason game against the Browns.

Injuries have been the only thing Cine has known in his NFL career. The Vikings picked him with the 32nd overall pick in the 2022 draft, but a gnarly broken leg in Week 4 ended his rookie season. In 2023, he only played eight defensive snaps, and the Vikings released him before the start of the 2024 campaign. The Bills then picked him up, and he was on their practice squad until the Eagles grabbed him. 

There were openings on the 53-man roster for depth safeties, but with Sydney Brown and Drew Mukuba showing promise, those spots are now shrinking. It feels like there’s no way that Cine is going to be able to snag one when he’s missing so much time. It stinks for him, but them’s the breaks.

WRs Terrace Marshall Jr. and Ainias Smith

The Eagles' wide receiver room is filling up weirdly quickly. Behind A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith and Jahan Dotson, there’s Johnny Wilson, Darius Cooper and now John Metchie. If the Eagles keep six wide receivers, it feels like the guys that'll be on the outside looking in are Ainias Smith and Terrace Marshall Jr. If the team decides to only keep five wide receivers? Woof. That’s tricky. 

The Eagles drafted Ainias Smith in the fifth round of the 2024 draft to be a shifty slot guy, but he dealt with injuries going into last season and didn’t do a whole lot. This season, training camp reports haven’t had a whole lot about to say about him, and while he does have a touchdown in both preseason games, he’s not popping like Wilson or Cooper.

It sure seems like he and Terrace Marshall, the former second-round pick and third wheel to Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson in LSU’s 2019 offense, are going to be the two guys who are going to get the axe. 

CB Eli Ricks

There probably isn’t a soul alive that’s cool with how the Eagles’ cornerbacks look right now. Yeah, Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean rock, but that means the other outside corner is going to get peppered with targets. 

Right now, the battle for that job is between Kelee Ringo, Adoree’ Jackson, Jakorian Bennett and maybe Mac McWilliams. The bad news is that none of those guys have absolutely run away with the job. The good news is that the three guys who don’t win the job are probably going to be depth options at cornerback on the 53-man roster.

That means guys like Eli Ricks, who, the Eagles signed as an undrafted free agent in 2023, aren’t going to make the cut. In the past, he’s shined in preseason games, but with this year’s preseason games actually being valuable for Vic Fangio to assess who’s going to be a starter, Ricks seems like he’s on the wrong side of the roster bubble.

OL Kenyon Green

To be fair to Kenyon Green, it’s not really his fault that he’s a higher-profile guy on this team. The Eagles traded C.J. Gardner-Johnson and a 2026 sixth-round pick to the Texans for Green and a 2025 fifth-round pick. It really stinks that the Eagles traded an impact player for a guy who’s ended up being a total dud. 

He was supposed to compete with Tyler Steen for the starting right guard spot, but that battle was just about as one-sided as a Sock ‘em Bopper fight with T-1000. Steen won that job going away, partly due to Green’s injuries and partly due to Green just not being good. 

Now, the problem here is that in the preseason game against the Browns, we saw just how not-great the Eagles' depth is on the offensive line. If the Eagles do keep Green, it’d be more of an indictment on the guys that they cut, rather than him beating guys and earning the spot.

QB Dorian Thompson-Robinson

Reports said that Dorian Thompson-Robinson was having a better training camp than Kyle McCord, which was kind of surprising. The thing with DTR’s game is that it’s not exactly practice-friendly. When he gets real pressure and has the threat of actually getting tackled, he can use his legs to scramble and extend plays … or he panics and everything goes to hell.

In the second preseason game, where he and McCord split drives, DTR did a whole lot more of the latter. You had two choices: You could watch him and be mad, or you could laugh because it was like a mid-2000s sports bloopers DVD. 

That one’s not completely his fault, and it was the worst rep that he had all game, but he did go 5-for-8 for just 17 yards. It’s just ugly watching him back there. To be fair, it’s also super ugly with McCord too, but he’s a sixth-round rookie, so patience kind of makes sense.