Philly Front Office

In this the year 2025, we are used to Howie Roseman knocking draft weekend out of the park. It wasn’t always this way. The last four drafts have yielded Pro-Bowlers and won us a Super Bowl. Even the 2020 draft, which seemed bad at the time, brought us Jalen Hurts. The last truly bad draft came in 2019. As much as we would love to forget it ever existed, we are going to talk about it.

The Draft

It’s not that there wasn’t any real talent in this draft year, but it was either late blooming or just poorly scouted. The first round has a few greats in it like Nick Bosa, Quinnen Williams, Chris Lindstrom, Dexter Lawrence, and Jeffrey Simmons, but for the most part it is littered with disappointments and better picks down the line. The only position that ended up producing solid regulars was Defensive Tackle with the 3 just mentioned, Christian Wilkins, and Ed Oliver.

Kyler Murray can do some amazing things on the field, but winning games isn’t exactly one of them. He was the #1 overall pick after winning the Heisman out of Oklahoma. Even though quarterbacks usually get over-drafted, it seemed fairly obvious even at the time that the 5’10” 200 pound Murray was not going to be a franchise QB. He is exciting, but that’s all. Still, he has been easily the best of all the QBs in this draft. Second, is again, EASILY Gardner Minshew and he was picked in the 6th round. Of the 3 other QBs taken in the first 42 picks, you have the late Dwayne Haskins, perennial low quality backup Drew Lock, and then there’s Daniel Jones. Jones was infamously over drafted at the time with history being very kind to those prognosticators. Jones never got better than bad in NY, but the Giants gave him a big second contract anyway. Despite not being on the roster anymore, he has a bigger cap hit than the rest of the Giants’ QBs combined.¹

Jones wasn’t the only total bust in the first round. Clelin Ferrel was another huge overdraft going 4th overall. He has trickled in about 3 sacks per season with 3 organizations. Next up was Devin White who managed to fail his way out of two great defenses in Tampa and Philly. Devin Bush, Jerry Tillery, LJ Collier, Deandre Baker, N’Keal Harry, Hollywood Brown, and especially Andre Dillard have all been disappointing first rounders at best.

Other than Bosa and the Defensive Tackles, you’d probably say the real elite talent in this one came later on, especially at receiver. Deebo Samuel, AJ Brown, DK Metcalf, and Terry McLaurin were all picked in rounds 2 and 3. Maxx Crosby went in the 4th. Now let’s get to the Birds.

The Eagles

Do you want to know why we had no faith in Howie by the 2020 draft? It’s because of what he did in 2019. Obviously, the worst part of this draft is the picks themselves. No one is still on the roster and only two are still in the league, barely. The real killer though is that the ideas behind the picks were spot on, we just picked the worst possible guys at each position. The post Super Bowl Eagles had finally committed to Carson Wentz and were working on his contract extension at the time. The plan was to compliment and protect him with a new offensive tackle, running back, wide receiver, and even get a cheap QB talent to be his backup. Again, good idea, but…damn, it didn’t work out AT ALL. We were ready to jump off a bridge the next year because this year was heavily invested in bridges and their great uses for jumping.

Going in, we were armed with a first (25th), two 2nds (53² and 57), two 4ths, and a bunch of late round picks. Why no 3rd rounder? We traded that for Golden Tate (damnit). The late rounders disappeared in a series of moves that included getting a guy named Deiondre Hall who I have never heard of and refuse to investigate. We lost the 4th when we decided to move up from 25th to 22nd to draft…

…Andre Dillard. The name lives in infamy now, but it didn’t seem like the worst pick in the world at the time. He was big, tested well, and was a 2 year starter at Washington State. By this point, Jason Peters was showing his age and we needed his replacement. Peters only came back this season under a lowered contract. We did have an Australian project sitting on the bench, but he only had a year of football under his belt. Dillard was expected to come in and start. As soon as practices began, the writing was on the wall. He wasn’t ready. Dillard started the year on the bench and only came on when Peters got hurt. It didn’t go well. The next season Dillard was injured in camp and would be out for the season. In 2021, that Australian was now showing out at practice and would enter camp battling Dillard for the LT position. It wasn’t much of a battle. The age of Jordan Mailata had begun. Going into 2022 his 5th year option was declined and Dillard only appeared in 5% of the snaps in 12 games with no starts. No one in Philly ever wanted to think of him again, but that didn’t stop the Titans from giving him a 3/$29m contract! He was cut the next year, signed with the Packers, and is currently a free agent. He might be done in the league. I don’t know why Dillard failed. He did have short arms but that doesn’t explain why he seemed so overmatched in the NFL. To make matters worse, Montez Sweat was picked at 26 and would have been there without trading anything.

In the second round, things were not Jalen Reagor bad, but pretty damn close. At 53, we picked Miles Sanders. Sanders was…fine. We needed a running back and he was the best available, but he probably underachieved as an Eagle considering the offensive line he was running behind (did he ever break a tackle?). The real problem was that we also needed a WR. AJ Brown went at 51, right before Sanders. Okay, that’s not ideal, but there were others still available. Mecole Hardman went 56 and Terry McLaurin went at 76, okay again because we didn’t know for sure they would be solid to great pros. The real problem was that DK Metcalf was available at 57. I don’t need to remind you that Metcalf is one of the most gifted physical specimens to ever walk this Earth, but I will. He looks like he was built in a lab to play football, specifically WR. He ran a 4.33 40, benched 225 27 times, and from a standing position can jump 3.5 ft high and over 11 feet far. The Eagles decided they wanted the complete opposite. Compared to Metcalf, JJ Arcega-Whiteside was smaller, couldn’t run nearly as fast, jump as high, or as far. This is petty, but he had huge teeth and a royal Spanish lisp from growing up in Spain. If you asked the average person to glance at both and choose, they would think it was a joke. Looks didn’t deceive. JJAWS ended his NFL career after 3 seasons with a final stat line of 16/290/1 with his lone TD coming off a fumble in the endzone. Metcalf’s single game highs are 12/177/2 and he has been a regular top flight receiver despite some less than ideal QBs in Seattle. It was an objectively terrible pick at the time and only got worse from there.

Want to know what else got worse from there? The rest of the 2019 draft! The Eagles final two picks were 4th round DE Shareef Miller out of Penn State and 5th round QB Clayton Thorson out of Northwestern. You aren’t expecting stars out of these picks, but you would like to see more than one career game. That’s all they got. Miller lasted two special teams snaps before getting waived and that is somehow infinitely better than Thorson’s ZERO. He was released during camp never to be heard from again. WTF!

I’m sure there are some Miles Sanders defenders out there, but all in all this was an abomination of a draft. We not only missed out on guys like Montez Sweat, AJ Brown, and DK Metcalf, but the guys we picked were total losers. 4 out of 5 draftees never played meaningful snaps in midnight green. If it wasn’t for getting incredibly lucky with Jordan Mailata the previous year, this draft would have been catastrophic.

1. Let’s rub it in a bit. Had the Giants picked an offensive lineman this season or literally anyone else, maybe they finish 2-14 instead of 4-12 so they can draft Joe Burrow the next season. Even if that’s a stretch, they still didn’t pick Tua or Justin Herbert because they already had Daniel Jones. Obviously, Jalen Hurts would have been a better pick than all of them, but they weren’t even in the market. ↩︎
2. The previous year we traded the 32nd pick to Baltimore for a 2018 2nd, 2018 4th, and 2019 2nd. Baltimore picked Lamar Jackson and we got Dallas Goedert and Miles Sanders. ↩︎