One of my favorite aspects of free agency every year isn’t just to see how the Eagles plan to improve their roster, but also to see what exactly their team building philosophies are. With two key moves today, Howie Roseman reinforced two key principles of the Eagles’ roster construction.
Firstly, letting Kyzir White walk today was a major indicator of the Eagles beliefs about off-ball linebackers. If Howie is not going to re-sign TJ Edwards for $6.5 million per year or Kyzir White for $5.5 million per year, he simply is not going to re-sign any off-ball linebacker ever. Linebacker, being a low value position in football, is evidently never going to be a place where the Eagles devote noteworthy free-agency money.
The re-signing of James Bradberry also confirmed my suspicions about the Eagles’ evaluation of cornerbacks that I’ve had for years. Philadelphia has not drafted a cornerback in the first round of the draft since 2001, which means that in no time during the Howie Roseman era has a cornerback been drafted in the first round. Does that mean the Eagles don’t value cornerbacks? No. It most likely means that the Eagles’ front office doesn’t feel confident in their ability to pick corners that high in the draft. If they did not value cornerback, they wouldn’t have signed James Bradberry to a $38 million deal today or Darius Slay to a $50 million deal in 2020.
This could also help explain why the Eagles highest reach for a cornerback was in the second round of the 2017 draft with Sidney Jones. Jones, being the consensus number 1 cornerback before he tore his ACL, did not require an extensive evaluation. And finally this year, with the 10th pick in the draft and 7 players almost wholly guaranteed to go in front of them (four quarterbacks, Anderson, Wilson, and Carter), the Eagles could very likely have their pick at the number 1 cornerback in the draft, but instead they extended Bradberry, leaving the need for an outside cornerback not a dire priority going into this year’s draft. Evidently, it seems as if the cornerback position is one the Eagles plan to add upon in the later rounds of the draft and via free-agency, not in the earliest rounds of the draft. This is most likely because they do not feel as confident in evaluating top-end cornerbacks as they do for other top-end positions.