To put it kindly, free agency has been less than ideal for the Philadelphia Eagles. To put it bluntly, it’s been really stupid and frustrating. The moves that Howie Roseman has made aren’t stupid; they make a frustratingly huge amount of sense long term. It just kind of feels stupid in your gut.
So far, the Eagles have lost five key players in the first week of free agency, and it’s all because of money that they need to free up for the future.
It’s dumb, but it makes sense. Unfortunately, we’ve been down this road before, where the Eagles let guys walk out the door, and they end up regretting it. It’s an uncomfortably familiar feeling.
We all kind of expected that some combination of Josh Sweat, Milton Williams, Darius Slay, and Isaiah Rodgers would find new teams, but instead, all four of them found new teams. Then, the Eagles traded away C.J. Gardner-Johnson, which was just really disappointing.
You never want to be able to say, ‘X player is gone, and now the Eagles are a worse football team,’ but that’s kind of where we are right now. In the past 10 years, it’s happened a lot. These are some of the players that the Eagles probably regretted trading away or regretted not re-signing.
By the way, I’m not taking salary cap implications into account for these guys, just how they were when they last played with the Eagles and how they were the season after players left.
Jeremy Maclin and LeSean McCoy, 2015
There’s not a whole lot that needs to be said about the Eagles trading away LeSean McCoy for Kiko Alonso. McCoy holds the franchise’s rushing record with 6,792 yards, and after he left the Eagles, he still had a really good career. It’s not like he was washed up or anything, and the fact that they signed DeMarco Murray, who was truly abysmal, was a massive kick in the groin.
On top of that, Alonso was awful. It was a truly terrible trade that everyone (except for head coach/de facto general manager Chip Kelly) hated.
Jeremy Maclin’s thing was different. The Eagles drafted him with the 19th overall pick in the 2009 draft. In his five years in Philadelphia, he had 342 catches for 4,771 yards and 36 touchdowns. That was all capped off by his 2014 Pro Bowl season, where he had 85 catches for 1,318 yards and 10 touchdowns.
Maclin hit free agency and signed a five-year, $55 million contract with the Kansas City Chiefs. He kept it rolling in the 2015 season with 87 catches for 1,088 yards and eight touchdowns.
Meanwhile, the Eagles would go on to have Jordan Matthews be their leading wide receiver with 87 catches for 997 yards and eight touchdowns. There’s been more than enough proof that having two wide receivers is wildly beneficial, and having Matthews and Maclin would’ve made everyone’s life a whole lot easier.
That being said, knowing how everything turned out in that 2015 season, Maclin was probably cool with this move.
Jordan Hicks, 2019
There was a four-year stretch from 2015-18 when Jordan Hicks was the Eagles linebacker. Until the Eagles signed Zack Baun this year, you were never really able to say that about anyone (maybe T.J. Edwards, but we’ll get to that).
He was a solid player, but he never got a crazy amount of shine because he hurt his Achilles in 2017 and was out for the Super Bowl. Then he came back in 2018 and missed some more games with a hurt hamstring.
You have to imagine those injuries played a part in why the Eagles decided not to re-sign him after his rookie contract. It turns out that those injuries would never really pop up again. The only time he’s missed since was in 2023 when he had a leg contusion that hospitalized him, which stinks.
The problem is that after Hicks left, linebackers became a pretty big weakness again. It was a mix of T.J. Edwards (who was a UDFA at the time), Duke Riley, Alex Singleton, Nathan Gerry, and Davion Taylor. Yuck.
Malcolm Jenkins, 2020
Malcolm Jenkins is an all-time Eagle. When you start listing the important players on the 2017 Super Bowl-winning team, he’s probably going to be the second or third name that comes to mind.
Him leaving was a little different because it seemed like it was a very mutual and respectful break up, where both parties decided it was just time to move on.
There probably wasn’t a whole lot of regret in letting Jenkins go from a personal standpoint, but after he left, the Eagles' defense was just worse. It wasn’t necessarily that the safeties (Jalen Mills and Rodney McLeod) were terrible, but the Eagles lost a leader. Based on how gut-wrenchingly terrible the 2020 team was, losing him was pretty important.
T.J. Edwards and C.J. Gardner-Johnson, 2023
Before Reed Blankenship, T.J. Edwards was the best UDFA the Eagles had signed in the last 10 years (shout out Corey Clement and Trey Burton). He cost nothing and then developed into one of the NFL’s really good linebackers.
The Eagles had a bunch of opportunities to extend Edwards, but they never did. He entered free agency and was signed by Chicago, which is his hometown team. So, good for him, but bad for the Eagles.
Without Edwards, the Eagles' 2023 linebackers were Nakobe Dean, Nicholas Morrow, Zach Cunningham, and Ben VanSumeren. Shaq Leonard signed in December, and he was supposed to be the savior. That’s not a situation that you want to be in.
C.J. Gardner-Johnson’s loss after the 2022 season was also pretty big. He played really well in that 2022 season and was tied for the most interceptions in the league despite missing five games with a lacerated kidney.
When C.J.G.J. left, it was really wonky because there was some kind of weird contract dispute, and then he metaphorically walked out the door with two birds in the air. It was ugly.
The 2023 safeties played just about as terribly as the linebackers. Reed Blankenship was pretty good, but Terrell Edmunds and Kevin Byard played about as terribly as you could imagine.
On top of that, losing Gardner-Johnson also means losing the stank that he brings. He’s chippy, violent, and an all-around pecky player that you want on your team. It wasn’t the same as when Malcolm Jenkins left, but it wasn’t all that different.
Now, he’s gone again, and the Eagles need to find a starting safety. Hopefully this one doesn’t come back to bite them the same way that it did before. History does this thing where it repeats itself, like, all the time.