The Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl and that’s beyond great. The only problem is that it felt like free agency started 30 seconds after the Super Bowl ended, and so far, free agency has not been fun.
We’ve seen seven key players from that Super Bowl-winning team find new teams. It hurts because we liked these guys and it felt like we owed them a life debt for what they did. But in a potentially futile, and definitely sad/copium-filled attempt to spin this into something good: it means Howie Roseman has killed his sentimentality.
Howie Roseman has learned from 2017
The reason the Eagles not re-signing any key players that went into free agency is clear: Their guys going into free agency were going to cost a lot of money and there are a lot of awesome young players (specifically Jalen Carter) who will get paid a cruise-ship-sized boatload of money in the next couple of years. To have the money to pay them, they need to save some money now, and the way to do that is by letting guys go.
That’s reality, and it’s a bittersweet one. It felt like the 2024 Eagles had a sustainable thing going on, which gave them a real shot at going back-to-back. The team is still really, really, extremely good, but new pieces mean new variables. If some of those go wrong, it can be a bad thing.
That being said, Howie Roseman is a genius. He’s built the most talented roster in the NFL twice in the past three seasons. If he’s comfortable with letting some good players go, then you have to trust him.
It just feels weird because this is kind of the first time that we’ve seen Howie Roseman do this: not allowing sentimentality to play a part in his signings.
I’m not saying that he’s held on to players in the past purely because of his feelings for them or about what they’ve done, but it’s hard to argue those feelings didn’t impact some of the re-signings he’s made in the past.
If you go back to the 2023 offseason, the Eagles just had a great Super Bowl run and a good part of it was due to how well the two cornerbacks, Darius Slay and James Bradberry, played all season.
Bradberry was on a one-year deal, and Slay was about to enter the last year of his contract. The problem is that both of them were going to be in their 30s for the 2023 season. Banking your defensive secondary’s success on a couple of 30-year-old cornerbacks is typically a bad idea.
The Eagles did exactly that; Slay restructured his contract (and added a couple more years), and Bradberry got a three-year deal. Slay’s thing ended up working perfectly, but Bradberry fell off a cliff almost immediately.
It’s easy to say all of this now because hindsight doesn’t have astigmatism. It kind of made sense that the Eagles went back to the well with Bradberry because he was incredible in that 2022 season… but also his career had been (and is) known for being wildly volatile year-to-year.
Something along the lines of, ‘Let’s run it back with James,’ must have been said at some point in those discussions. Unfortunately, that meant that the Eagles wouldn’t be signing a younger corner like Bryon Murphy or even Shaquille Griffin, who were both available at the time. Also hindsight, if they signed someone else Quinyon Mitchell and/or Cooper DeJean wouldn’t be Eagles.
If you go back further there are other examples of sentimental signings: Darren Sproles (2018, 2019), Jason Peters (2019, 2020), Jay Ajayi (2019), and Alshon Jeffery’s extension (2017).
There are others, but the general theme after Howie Roseman won his first Super Bowl was to keep players around and unintentionally neglect the development of younger guys, which was a decision that came to a head in 2020 when the Eagles had a 4-11-1 record.
So, does it hurt that the Eagles didn’t keep Mekhi Becton? Yes, but Tyler Steen is cheaper and still has time to develop. Does it hurt that C.J. Garner-Johnson got traded? Like a huge kick in the nuts, but now Sydney Brown can step up. Does it hurt to see Darius Slay and Isaiah Rodgers leave? Absolutely, but Kelee Ringo is only 22 years old.
Howie Roseman is saving money, trusting his draft picks (which have been working out lately), and not chasing the past for an immediate payoff. He’s learned from the past, and the 2026 and 2027 Eagles are definitely going to be better for it. The 2025 team? It seems unlikely, but sometimes the winds blow in mysterious ways during Howie SZN.
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