When the Philadelphia Eagles traded CJ Gardner-Johnson and a sixth-round pick to the Houston Texans for Kenyon Green and a fifth-round pick, it turned heads within the fanbase.
Why would the Eagles, fresh off a Super Bowl win, ship out one of their better defensive player for a slight move up the draft board next year and a failed former first-round pick who has struggled mightily in Houston?
Breaking his silence on the decision at the NFL meetings in Palm Beach, Howie Roseman broke down the situation, letting inquisitive fans know that the decision had more to do with the team's future cap situation than CJGJ's on-field abilities.
“Well, I think if you're just taking the C.J. move in a vacuum, obviously, it's kind of not giving the whole perspective of where we're at,” Roseman said via NBC Sports Philadelphia. “Chauncey did a great job for us in both the years that he was with us, obviously making the Super Bowl twice in two years with him as our starting safety. When you look at our team and you look at the amount of highly paid players who have earned their contracts — we've got eight guys who are making $15 million or more. We have, from 2022 to 2024 drafts, we have eight starters who are on the Super Bowl team. None of those guys have long-term contracts. In those drafts, we probably have five or six players that will be competing for starting jobs. So you have a lot of players coming through that aren't under long-term contracts, plus a lot of guys who are on long-term contracts, and we never want to be in a situation where we have one year where we're getting rid of 20 guys.
“And we've been very fortunate to be aggressive in keeping our guys and signing guys in free agency. And it's also gotta align with (the) draft and having young players. Certainly, that's the important thing to do is draft well and then keep your players. We've got to make sure that going forward, we have an opportunity to do that as well. A lot of those players that we're talking about are good young players that we're excited about.”
You know, on paper, it's really hard to argue with what Roseman is saying; the Eagles are expected to start nine defensive players on rookie-scale contracts this fall, with only Zack Baun and the edge rusher opposite Nolan Smith likely being veteran players. Even if the Eagles were able to keep Gardner-Johnson this year, they likely would have moved him next year in order to avoid a $4.6 million cap hit in 2026 plus roughly $11 million in dead cap over the following four years via void years.
Roseman's smart scheming helped to get Gardner-Johnson to town and another Lombardi in Jeffrey Lurie's trophy case. But in the end, that same cap wizardry led to the veteran safety's eventual exit, as CJGJ's deal gets expansive when players like Jalen Carter and Nolan Smith will too.
