The Eagles laid out their plan during last week’s owner’s meetings. It was one we should have been familiar with by now given this offseason of financial restraint in free agency. They want to sign as many players that they have drafted over the last several years.
DeVonta Smith and Landon Dickerson, the 1-2 picks from 2021 are already on their second contracts. The goal is to take care of the next wave and the one after that and the one after that.
There were seven defensive starters that arrived in the draft between 2022-2024 with a half-dozen either key contributors or players who will likely need to step into starting roles even more of a contributing role, players such as Sydney Brown, Tyler Steen, Kelee Ringo, Moro Ojomo, and Jalyx Hunt.
The goal of every team is to draft well then figure out a way to keep as many of those selected as possible after they develop and then prove themselves. The Eagles are no different and, as they prepare to draft another crop of young players with eight picks over the three days at the end of the month, they want to continue to build that way.
That’s the long-term outlook, though.
Right now, it’s about finding a way to keep three starters that arrived in 2022 and whose contract expire at the end of the 2025 season – Jordan Davis, Cam Jurgens, and Nakobe Dean.
They must do it in a way that will allow them to keep starters that came in 2023 – Jalen Carter, Nolan Smith, and four others who still have to play their way into the future plans. They are Brown, Steen, Ringo, and Ojomo.
And it’s never too early to start thinking about the 2024 class the landed Quinyon Mitchell, Cooper DeJean, and Hunt.
“Our job is to worry and have causes for concern, no matter how many good players we have on our team, and our job is to try to replace those and to continue to have depth”, general manager Howie Roseman told reporters at the owner’s meeting, “We're incomplete right now. There's no doubt about it. Talent-acquisition season has just started, and it goes for a long time, and we continue to try to find any possible ways to upgrade the depth and the talent level on our team.
“It just looks different than maybe it looked last year, when that was a big focus on that was probably in the free-agent market. So, being able to re-sign your own players, and I think we got to go back even last year (when) we extended AJ (Brown), we extended DeVonta, we extended Jordan Mailata, we extended Landon. Those are part of what we're trying to do to get out in front of things. So, yeah, obviously, when you lose good players, you want to, you want to replace them. And we'll continue to look at these.”
