When it comes to draft picks, it's fair to say he does.
Last night Eagles executive VP and GM Howie Roseman opened his 2025 Draft with linebacker Jihaad Campbell, continuing a trend Roseman has fostered in his last several draft hauls.
You may think the trend is drafting players from Alabama or Georgia, and while you’re not wrong, there is a more overarching theme in the players on Howie’s shopping list.
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The large majority of Roseman draft selections, no matter where they played their college ball, share one quality.
They’re elite athletes.
“At the end of the day, you see it and what's going on in the league,” Roseman said last night after Campbell was selected. “And [LB] Zack Baun's a great example. I mean these guys, they can rush from the edge, they can play in space, they can affect the quarterback from depth, from the edge, and that's what we're looking for.
Eagles Draft
“We're looking for guys like that. And the league has changed. I think the league is a speed game, and when you have guys with those kind of explosive qualities, you want to get as many as you can.”
Kent Lee Platte created a metric to measure potential draftable players, combining certain measurables with their results from the NFL Combine or that player’s Pro Day. The result is called Relative Athletic Score (RAS), a single figure analysts can use to compare against other players of the same position, including over multiple years.
Players are scored on a zero to ten scale. Roseman’s selections over the last handful of years seem to be as close to ten as you can reach.
Take Campbell, for instance:
The Gloucester Township native scored a 9.88 RAS out of 10. Platte’s scoring goes back to 1987, and only 40 linebackers had a better RAS than Campbell.
You’ll notice the theme as you dig deeper. In the 2024 Draft, the Eagles selected nine players, eight of which had an RAS (5th-round pick Jeremiah Trotter Jr. did not run the 40, and wasn’t measured for vertical leap or broad jump at the combine). Of those eight, seven had a RAS of 9.00 or greater, and their composite average score was 9.312, second-highest to the Commanders (9.427).
In 2023, the six players drafted averaged a 9.11 RAS, led by Sidney Brown’s 9.68.
The 2022 draft class was led by DT Jordan Davis, who scored a perfect 10.00 RAS.
Milton Williams was the jewel of the 2021 draftees, with a near-perfect 9.96.
Does a high amount of athleticism guarantee the player drafted will have a successful pro career? Not necessarily. Linebacker Baron Browning scored a 9.98 out of Ohio State, the top LB in the class, ahead of Micah Parsons. He was picked in the third round by the Broncos. Browning started just 26 games in three-plus seasons in Denver before being traded to Airizona.
The bottom line is, as Roseman astutely put it, the league is getting faster. Athleticism isn’t the most important trait when looking at potential, but you can’t argue with the Eagles results.