Adrian Fedkiw
The Philadelphia Eagles have their franchise quarterback, now they have to build around Carson Wentz.
It’s going to be imperative that they do so through the NFL Draft because the team is cash-strapped due to all the money they have spent on free agents and the extensions they’ve handed out the last couple years. The draft, however, is Howie Roseman and the Eagles’ downfall. Nelson Agholor, Marcus Smith, Danny Watkins, you get the point.
Enter Joe Douglas.
Douglas was hired by the Eagles in May to head their personnel department and during his end-of-season press conference on Wednesday, the Eagles’ vice president of football operations Howie Roseman stated that he will lead the draft room and form the draft board.
(Douglas has) a way of looking and evaluating players that is different than what we’ve done in the past and, quite frankly, we needed that. He has full rein to set the draft board. He’s involved in every discussion we have about building this team. And I think we’ll start seeing dividends.
Roseman, however, will still have final say.
It’s a collaborative effort when we talk about who we’re picking and at the end of the day, the responsibility is mine.
Roseman might have the last word, but it’s a step in the right direction to hand over all of this power to Douglas, who has an encouraging track record. He spent 15 years with the Baltimore Ravens, joining the team in 2000. He was responsible for scouting quarterback Joe Flacco and running back Ray Rice when he was the East Coast scout in 2008 and played a key role in evaluating cornerback Lardarius Webb and 3-4 outside linebacker Pernell McPhee when he was a Southeast area scout from 2009-11.
He was then promoted to national scout following the 2012 NFL Draft. When legendary linebacker Ray Lewis retired and mammoth 3-4 defensive end Haloti Ngata signed elsewhere, Douglas helped in the draft process to replace them with nose tackle Brandon Williams and inside linebacker C.J. Mosley.
Impressive.
Roseman is right, the way Douglas looks at and evaluates players is on a completely different level than what the Eagles have done in the past, but that’s not really saying much. As long as Roseman stays out of his way and lets Douglas do his thing, the Birds seem to be in good shape moving forward.
I think when we look at the success the Ravens had, and certainly they won two world championships since the start of the century, what they’re looking for and the traits they’re looking for in particular positions, fits the way this city is built too. We want to find whatever ways there are to improve this team and to improve the quality of players on this team. And I’m really confident that we have the people in our scouting staff to do that.
The Ravens draft model isn’t a bad one to mimic. Hopefully a parade down Broad Street follows.
This Eagles team is such a horrible mess I almost feel sorry for the drunks that continue to go down there and pay to watch this crap. If these “loyal” fans would just stay home a couple of years maybe Lurie would sell the team(?)
We will never win anything with this dimwit owner, GM or coach. Lurie has hired 4 coaches. 3 of them were horrible choices and Andy Reid was a consensus choice that every NFL team knew about. He hasn’t hired a decent GM since Tom Modrak was here. The GM we have now is good at figuring out how to package choices to move around in the draft but unfortunately he has no clue how to pick talent after the first few picks are gone.
Pederson is about a good a coach as he was a QB. In other words he stinks. I also question the intelligence of a coach who challenged (and won) an incompletion that gained 2 meaningless yards. Even the announcers on TV were laughing at this stupidity. And how can an NFL coach not understand that it is more important to use timeouts at the end of games when the other team has the ball ???
This isn’t coaching or complicated, it’s just common sense and Doug Pederson doesn’t have any.