We are 2 weeks away from training camp and about 8 weeks from the regular season. It’s time to take a look at what the Eagles did on their spring vacation and see how the Super Bowl Champions look on their quest to repeat. I wanted to do this as one big article, but damn football is complicated. The series will run in parts all week addressing:
As always, the Eagles pay for greatness, not just goodness…
Saquon Barkley
While all of the extension anxiety was focused on Zack Baun this offseason, it was the spontaneous contract for Saquon Barkley that stole the show. Barkley became an inflection point for roster building when he signed his 3/$37.75m contract with the Eagles last year. Immediately people said he was overpaid and questioned the Eagles utilization of resources. 2000+ yards and a Super Bowl later it was clear that he was a bargain at that price. As I’ve said countless times, the Eagles pay for greatness. His new 2/$41m extension pays him for that greatness. The deal allows the Eagles to spread its signing bonus over the two years remaining on the initial bargain deal. This allows the cap hit to stay relatively low over the life of the deal at only $6.6m, $9.8m, $12.8m, and $17m for the next 4 seasons. Somehow it was both a reward and a bargain.
That price represents a new highwater mark for running backs, beating out the previous $19m per season received by Christian McCaffrey. The Eagles did not have to give him this extension. This isn’t the first time they have jumped the gun on an extension for a great player though. They make it very clear that if you have left your old contract in the dust, they will pay you accordingly. That’s what they did with AJ Brown before the season. The receiver market went up dramatically after Brown signed his initial 4/$100m contract so they rewarded him with a basically unsolicited (not really, but before anyone had any idea) 3/$96m extension. This shows the roster and players around the league that the Eagles take care of their stars (Mailata too, that contract is goooooood).
Barkley is a star of stars. After years of toiling away in the cesspool organization that is the New York Giants, he finally got to see a professional team with a confident QB, weapons everywhere, and an elite offensive line. The result was the full deployment of his powers. The union of the Eagles line and Barkley allows him to get to the second level so fast that the secondary can’t react in time to get in front of him. All he has to do is make a linebacker miss and he will outrun everyone else for the most part. He had something like 10 runs over 40 yards this year for that reason. That is a game-breaking talent and what makes this team’s running attack something truly special.
Zack Baun
Saquon Barkley was the biggest news of extension season, but Zack Baun was the most important. Even though he was electric last year basically from start to finish, there was a real fear that the emergence of Nakobe Dean would cause the Eagles to let Baun walk in free agency. Once Dean went down, the Eagles hands were tied and they did the right thing.
Baun signed a completely reasonable 3/$51m extension. There are a few outlier linebacker deals signed by Fred Warner and Roquon Smith that Baun could have used as precedent but thankfully did not demand in negotiations. Instead, he gets a bit more than the inferior Patrick Queen received the year before. At 28 years old, he was the single best linebacker in football last year and it was all basically out of nowhere. Had he had sustained greatness of even just one more season, he could have demanded the moon. No one had ever seen a breakout like this before though. I don’t think anyone has ever seen a previously unheralded player fit in so seamlessly with a coordinator and a new system before.
Cap hits on the deal are only $4.3m, $7.5m, and $11.8m for the next 3 years.
Now with Baun in the fold for 3 more years and the drafting of Jihaad Campbell, it’s Dean that might be the odd man out coming off injury. It is going to be really interesting to see what the Eagles do with the captain of the Bulldogs defense. Dean is also up for an extension, but that probably is not in the best interests of him or the team.
Cam Jurgens
After the heavy lifting of Saquon and Baun, the Eagles locked up Cam Jurgens to a 4/$68m contract, making him the 2nd highest paid center in the league. The hand-picked successor to Jason Kelce looked every part of the next generation of elite Eagles’ centers this season and has been paid accordingly. The deal itself comes with absurdly low cap hits for the next 3 seasons: $3.5m, $5.5m, and $8.6m. This allows the bigger deals of Landon Dickerson, Lane Johnson, and Jordan Mailata to breathe a bit. The Chiefs experienced offensive line turnover this season claiming they could not afford to pay all its linemen, well, the Eagles found a way.
When it comes to interior line performance, most of what you need to know is the less you hear about the center, the better. If you are hearing the name Cam Jurgens during a broadcast, it is most likely because he is allowing pressure up the middle or getting called for penalties. In Kelce’s last season, we started to hear his name called on the field just as much as off it, meaning he was getting whistles. The false starts and holding penalties were becoming a problem. That disappeared last season with Jurgens. He anchors maybe the best single unit in all of football, the Eagles offensive line.
I can’t just not mention what happened in the NFC Championship game. Jurgens should have been inactive with a back injury, but he dressed anyway JUST IN CASE. Well, wouldn’t you know it, Landon Dickerson who had moved over to Center in his absence gets beat up pretty good and has to leave the game at halftime. Jurgens with an injured back finishes out the game and takes us to a Super Bowl. This story doesn’t get talked about enough and should go down in sacred Philly lore along with Aaron Rowand.
Nick Sirianni
The coach who was nearly run out of town during the bye week won the Super Bowl and got his extension. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but you better believe he entered the upper echelon of coaching salaries. Now that it has its crown, the resume he has put together has become hard to deny for all of his many haters around the league:
- Super Bowl Champion
- 2x Super Bowl Appearances
- 48-20 overall record
- .706-win percentage (5th all-time)
- 4 playoff appearances in 4 seasons
- 9-6 playoff record
- no losing seasons
For all of us, the above is great, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. When I say he was nearly run out of town earlier in the year, let’s not fool ourselves, he would have deserved it. The 2023 team collapsed and the 2024 team looked like it hadn’t learned any lessons. Then the players came to Nick and asked him to implement some changes. Instead of blowing them off in some kind of tough guy last stand, he listened. It takes a special kind of person to realize that maybe they don’t have all the answers and to change. Nick did this in his first season too. It’s made all the difference. Nobody wants an inflexible stubborn leader. They want someone they can trust and to have their back. That’s Nick and that’s why the Eagles are Champions.
Reed Blankenship?
There is still one possible extension left on the Eagles to-do list: Reed Blankenship. The 4th year safety has been a really good pickup since he went undrafted out of Middle Tennessee. I stress “really good” instead of haphazardly throwing around a “great” label because as mentioned the Eagles tend to not pay “really good” and fork over the money for “great.” Anthony DiBona reported that the two sides haven’t even talked about an extension all summer. This is the front office taking its principles to an extreme.
The safety market blew up with big deals for Javon Holland and Travon Moehrig and you can believe that Reed wants to cash in. If his market was in the $5m-$10m per year range they would probably already have a deal. It is clearly higher than that. While a deal still might get done, the Eagles might be happy to wait and see what this year brings. If Reed levels up again, then he might either enter the Eagles calculus or really price himself out. We’ll see.
Philly Front Office 
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