At 10:16 pm Eastern on February 9th, 2025, Kenny Pickett took a knee. At 10:17 pm, the 2024 NFL season was over, and the Philadelphia Eagles won Super Bowl LIX.
Maybe you’re a person who says, ‘Okay, that’s enough for this year. The offseason isn’t my thing. I’m not going to pay attention to anything until Labor Day and when I actually get to see a 53-man roster… Or maybe, your concussion count is in the double digits and you can’t remember May. Whatever the case, this is everything that’s happened with the Eagles (and some other stuff) since Super Bowl Sunday.
Seven months of anticipation
There were 207 days between the end of the 2024 season and the start of the 2025 season. Now we have only days left to brag about how the Eagles beat the Chiefs 40-6, unprompted.
Come Banner Night on September 4th, when the Eagles start the 2025 season against the Cowboys, that ends. It’s totally fine to talk about the 40-6, but society is going to frown upon starting conversations with other people (read: Non-Eagles people) by dropping the real score. If you don’t care about society? More power to you. I wish I was that way. Go Birds.
Anyway, this is everything that’s happened over the past seven months.
Offensive coordinator change
Two days after the Super Bowl, offensive coordinator Kellen Moore took the head coaching job in New Orleans. They don’t make coaches’ contracts and salaries publicly available, but you have to really hope that Moore not only got a shipping container filled with gold bars set in his front yard, but also a five-year contract.
That team is unbelievably far from being moderately competitive, and Kellen Moore has paid his dues as a coordinator. He should get a real shot to turn that terrible franchise around.
A week after he left, the Eagles hired Kevin Patullo as their new offensive coordinator. He’s been with Nick Sirianni since they were in Indianapolis back in 2020. When they both came to the Eagles in 2021, Patullo became the passing game coordinator, and that’s where he’s been since.
It feels like the offense isn’t going to be looking all that different this year… but if a passing game coordinator becomes an offensive coordinator, it seems reasonable to think the passing game might look a little more complex.
Patullo is, however, infinitely more charismatic than Moore. If you don’t watch the press conferences, that probably doesn’t matter to you, but I do, and it does.
The Combine
The combine is supposed to be about college prospects getting their shine and showing off what kind of athletic freaks they can really be. It’s actually more about hearing from head coaches, general managers, and owners for the first time in the offseason… It’s also about NFL insiders eating shrimp cocktails, getting in fights at Starbucks, and drinking until the wee hours of the morning.
The Howie Roseman part of this is what’s important here. In his press conference at the combine, he said that the offseason was going to look different than what people normally expect.
It was super vague and confusing, and no one knew what that really meant at the time. Turns out that meant the Eagles weren’t going to make any huge free agent signings. They chose to trust their young guys on defense and save money to pay Jalen Carter and Nolan Smith next offseason.
Free Agency
This is where the more newsworthy changes came. First and foremost, on March 4th, the Eagles gave Saquon Barkley a two-year contract extension for $41.2 million. That made him the highest-paid running back in the history of the NFL, and rightfully so.
The next day, the Eagles gave Zack Baun a three-year contract for $51 million. The two best free agents that they signed before the 2024 season were locked in… Then, the pain started.
Milton Williams signed a mondo-sized four-year, $104 million contract with the Patriots. Josh Sweat signed a four-year, $76.4 million deal with the Cardinals. Mekhi Becton signed a two-year, $20 million deal with the Chargers. Darius Slay signed a one-year, $10 million deal with the Steelers. Isaiah Rodgers signed a two-year, $15 million deal with the Vikings. That’s a lot of guys who played some key roles, but it was expected that all of them were going to leave.
The one that caught everyone by surprise was when the Eagles traded C.J. Gardner-Johnson to the Texans for Kenyon Green. C.J. G.J. was the attitude of the best defense in the NFL, and the Eagles sent him away to save money. It stunk (and it still does), but it kind of made sense.
Howie Roseman didn’t make any splashy additions in free agency. There were a handful of edge rushers in Azeez Ojulari, Josh Uche, and Ogbo Okoronkwo (who signed in July). Running back A.J. Dillon, cornerback Adoree’ Jackson, and tight end Kylen Granson were also some additions.
It’s easy to say that these guys probably won’t work out in the long run, but you probably also said that about Zack Baun last year, and he became a first-team All-Pro linebacker… so, yeah.
Luckily, in the midst of all of this, the Eagles also extended Lane Johnson for another year, which means he’s just going to play until he says he’s done. So that was kind of reassuring.
And then on March 18th, Brandon Graham retired after 15 seasons with the Eagles. That’s two seasons in a row where we’ve lost a legend, and it doesn’t get easier. Fortunately, B.G. went out on top and got to do his retirement speech sitting between both of his Lombardis. I’m gonna miss that man.
The team is well on their way to getting some more super-long-tenured players: At the end of April, Cam Jurgens signed a four-year, $68 million extension, and Jordan Davis had his fifth-year option exercised, which means he won’t be a free agent after this season.
Free agency was mostly all good stuff, except for the part where it wasn’t nearly as fun as it was in 2024.
The Tush Push Saga
One of the biggest stories of the early part of the offseason was whether or not the Tush Push was going to get banned. It didn’t, but it was a whole weird, drawn-out thing.
The Packers and their President, Mark Murphy, submitted a proposal to have the play banned. At the owners’ meeting in March/April, the vote was inconclusive (or something like that), and they put it off until the next time they met in May.
That time, Jeffrey Lurie brought in Jason Kelce to talk about it as a player. For some reason, front office people around the league took Kelce saying that he didn’t like running the play, as him saying that it was a dangerous play.
I guess Kelce set the record straight, and the vote to ban the play failed. 24 teams needed to vote against it, and only 22 teams did. That means it’s easier to list the teams that voted to keep the play: Ravens, Patriots, Lions, Browns, Jaguars, Dolphins, Saints, Titans, Jets.
— Philadelphia Eagles (@Eagles) May 21, 2025
Two things of note there: the Lions are the only team that the Eagles play this year that voted to keep the play. Shane Steichen’s Colts and Jonathon Gannon’s Cardinals voted to ban the play; two guys who got their jobs partially due to the success of the Tush Push. Those two guys? They’re dead to me.
The Eagles ended up posting a 26-minute video of only tush pushes, and it rocked.
The Draft
During the draft, the Eagles moved around a little bit, as Howie Roseman is wont to do. The notable picks were Jihaad Campbell (linebacker, Alabama), Drew Mukuba (safety, Texas), Ty Robinson (defensive tackle, Nebraska), Mac McWilliams (cornerback, Central Florida), Smael Mondon (linebacker, Georgia), and Cameron Williams (offensive tackle, Texas).
Campbell fell to the Eagles late in the first round because he was coming off shoulder surgery, and a whole bunch of teams were very scared about that. Drew Mukuba was the Eagles' second-round pick, and based on the last six second-round picks, we’ll all fall in love with him, and he’ll become a staple. Cameron Williams was picked in the sixth round. He’s super raw, but he has the potential to be Lane Johnson’s replacement down the line.
OTAs
You don’t get a whole lot from the news from the spring workouts. All they really do is serve as a ceremonial start to the summer because we don’t get any football news for two months once they’re over.
That being said, the Eagles are the reigning Super Bowl Champions and they lost five key players on defense. It was worth paying attention to what they were going to do at safety with Reed Blankenship's partner and the cornerback opposite of Quinyon Mitchell.
Spoiler Alert: We still don’t know.
The Eagles are going to keep Cooper DeJean on the field as much as humanly possible. When they’re in nickel (one extra defensive back), he’s going to be the nickel corner just like he was last season. When they’re in base… that's where the question mark comes into play.
He was getting reps at both safety and outside cornerback. They’re going to make sure they’re getting the best 11 players on the field, and it feels like DeJean is going to play at whichever spot has the most untrustworthy new starter.
Vic Fangio needs practice reps and film to assess players, and that's not something he gets a lot of in the spring. The defensive backfield was something that was going to have to get sorted out in training camp.
Training Camp
Everything was set up for Kelee Ringo to win the starting cornerback job. When the Eagles picked him in the fourth round of the 2023 draft, he was only 20 years old, so he was a guy who was going to have to develop to finally win the starting job… that’s not what happened.
Adoree’ Jackson, who is going into his ninth season in the NFL, was his competition. Performance-wise, Jackson offers a higher floor than Ringo, but also a much lower ceiling. He’s not really the guy you want as a starter for a 17-game season.
Those two were splitting reps for most of training camp. In a perfect world, one of them (hopefully Ringo) would set themselves apart in the competition… They didn’t.
The battle kept on going, and it all came to a head in the first preseason game. Normally, you don’t put much stock into those games, but that game was against the Bengals, who were playing their starters in the first half.
Getting reps against one of the better quarterbacks, one of the best wide receivers, and one of the highest-powered offenses in the NFL is a good test. Unfortunately, Ringo and Adoree’ Jackson didn’t look that great.
The good news is that two days before that game, the Eagles traded with the Raiders for cornerback Jakorian Bennett. He’s a small dude who’s had some injury concerns, but he can play ball.
Over the rest of the summer, Ringo kept slipping down the depth chart, Jackson stayed the same, and Bennett kept rising up. I imagine Jackson will get the start in Week 1, but Bennett will eventually take the starting job.
As for safety. The battle was between Sydney Brown and rookie Drew Mukuba. Reports said that Mukuba looked pretty solid in training camp, and then he flashed in the preseason game against the Browns when he had a pick-six and a fumble recovery. The problem is that he missed a lot of time because of some injuries.
Sydney Brown looked good, too. He wasn’t necessarily the liability that he had been in the past, and he said that he was becoming more comfortable in Fangio’s scheme.
The bottom line with that competition is that there was no clear winner, but it’s different from the cornerback competition because both guys looked good.
One big surprise in training camp was Jihaad Campbell. He was supposed to be coming off an injury, and we weren’t supposed to see him in practice until some time in mid to late August. He ended up coming out on the first day of training camp, practiced every day, and earned a starting job next to Zack Baun.
Other than that, the big takeaways from training camp were that Tyler Steen is going to be the starting right guard, UDFA wide receiver Darius Cooper kind of rocks, Quinyon Mitchell is set up to have a huge year (he’ll shadow WR1s), defensive tackle Moro Ojomo is a stud, and Jordan Davis once again lost a lot of weight and is ready to not just be a run stuffer.
It’s all good stuff. Jordan Mailata summed up the team’s attitude this season. He said, “I think we’ve done a great job this offseason of just keeping the main thing the main thing. And the main thing was just moving on. That was the main thing this year, moving on because whatever we did last year, it’s in the rearview mirror, and now it doesn’t matter anymore. We’re not defending nothing. We’re not the defending champs. We’re the 2024 World Champs. That’s it… We just won the title, and now we've got to go win it again. Prove it all over again. That’s the mentality this team is going to have.”