The Philadelphia Eagles shocked the NFL world earlier this month by trading safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson to the Houston Texans for offensive guard Kenyon Green and a fifth-round pick.
Many questioned why the Eagles would trade away a core part of their defense after winning the Super Bowl. GM Howie Roseman shed some light on the situation at the NFL annual meetings.
"I think if you're just taking the C.J. move in a vacuum, it's kind of not giving the whole perspective of where we're at. And I think Chauncey did a great job for us, and both the years that he was with us — obviously, making the Super Bowl twice in two years with him as our starting safety.
"Really, when you look at our team and you look at kind of the amount of highly paid players who earned their contracts — we got eight guys who are making $15 million or more — we have from the 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, 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 got to align with the draft and having young players.
Certainly that that's the important thing to do, is draft well and then keep your players. And so we 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. And so we had to make some tough decisions here."
The Eagles let several good players walk this offseason due to financial constraints, including key contributors Milton Williams, Josh Sweat, and Isaiah Rodgers. Retaining Zack Baun was their top priority this offseason, and they signed him to a three-year, $51 million extension. They also extended Saquon Barkley and Lane Johnson.
Roseman likely wanted to avoid a potential contract dispute with ...
