Desperation is the default state for any NFL team without a franchise quarterback, so it’s no surprise that the Philadelphia Eagles felt the urgent need to land one last offseason. Their anxiety was compounded, though, by the realization that competition for quality QBs was about to skyrocket.
In studying the state of affairs across the league, executive vice president of football operations Howie Roseman and the rest of the Eagles brass recognized there was “a graying of the quarterback position in the National Football League.” Many of the top signal-callers are in their twilight, they observed, and it won’t be long before they exit the game. When that happens, the talent pool will shrink and the demand will go up.
“Just like Peyton Manning retired ... age gets everyone at some point,” Roseman said last year, shortly after trading for the No. 2 overall pick to land Carson Wentz. “Teams are going to be looking for new quarterbacks. How many teams are you going to be competing against?”
Last year it was Manning. On Tuesday, it was Tony Romo. And there are more to come. Tom Brady is 39. Drew Brees is 38. Carson Palmer is 37. Eli Manning is 36. Ben Roethlisberger and Philip Rivers are 35. And Aaron Rodgers (33) and Joe Flacco (32) have logged a good amount of miles, too.
As Kevin Clark of the Ringer noted a year ago, the top eight players in passing yards per game in 2015 all were over 30. This past season, it was six of eight. That speaks in part to seasoning, but also to the point that many of the best quarterbacks in the game are on the back nine.
A team or two, such as the Dallas Cowboys and perhaps the New England Patriots, might have a quality successor in-house. The rest will be on the hunt.
That is part of the reason the Eagles felt compelled to pounce on the opportunity presented to them this time last year.
“Can we, at some point, without tanking, which you don’t do in football, acquire or have any access to getting a franchise quarterback?” Jeffrey Lurie said at the owners meetings last week, recounting the Eagles' thinking at the time. “They don’t come around very often. You hope you pick well when they do, but how do you get to that, because usually a team that’s finished with the worst record or the worst two records in the league, their basic problem is they have no quarterback.”
Last year was unique. The Tennessee Titans, holding the No. 1 overall pick, had secured their QB of the future the year before by drafting Marcus Mariota. The Cleveland Browns, meanwhile, seemed lukewarm on Wentz and big on stockpiling assets, and were agreeable to trading out of the No. 2 spot. The Eagles tried hard to land the top pick, per Lurie, but the Rams outbid them. Once the Eagles determined the Rams were taking Jared Goff, they made the push to trade with Cleveland so they could select Wentz, their preferred QB all along.
Before any of these wheels were set in motion, the Eagles studied the 2016, ’17 and even ’18 quarterback class, and matched the level of talent with the number of teams that could potentially be in the market for a new signal-caller. The conclusion they came to was that 2016 was a good year to go for it, especially given that demand was about to be on the rise – a realization that quarterback-hungry teams could be faced with in the near future.