A timid linebacker. A lackadaisical corner. And a running back that’s a shell of his former self.
Howie Roseman dropped a lot of dead weight Monday when he shipped Kiko Alonso, Byron Maxwell and DeMarco Murray out of town. The moves will save the Eagles about $10 million in cap room in 2016, but more importantly, Roseman acted decisively to get rid of the wrong players.
But can he find the right ones?
That’s really the big question.
And because the Eagles will get draft picks back as compensation in the deals and have more cap room to work with in free agency, it’s a pretty pertinent one as well.
We know Roseman is a shrewd businessman. We know he’s a wizard when it comes to manipulating the salary cap and building good contracts. We know he’s a hard and tireless worker.
What we don’t know is if he can be any good as a talent evaluator. And there are plenty of examples to give pause.
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Back on Jan. 19, the day the Eagles introduced Doug Pederson as the team’s new head coach, Roseman spoke publicly for the first time in over a year and for the first time since he had his personnel power stripped in favor of Chip Kelly.
By that date, Kelly was long gone, about to take the job in San Francisco and — although we didn’t necessarily know it yet — Roseman had been handed the keys to the organization yet again.
So, this was the exact question I asked Roseman that day: “How would you evaluate yourself as a talent evaluator?”
“I think that you have to look at the mistakes that you've had and understand why those were mistakes and obviously the successes that you had, and you kind of try to learn from everything,” he said. “I think that's all you can do in this. You can learn from things and that's a part of the growing process in anything you've done.”
Yeah, he didn’t really answer the question. Instead, he acknowledged something we already knew: There have been hits and misses under Roseman the general manager.
In that same press conference, Roseman took the credit (blame) for drafting Marcus Smith in the first round of 2014. And Smith isn’t the only miss — he’s one of many.
The problem is that it’s hard to pin down which moves are solely on Roseman. He became GM in 2010, but that was when Andy Reid was still the head coach and had final say. Reid wasn’t fired until after the 2012 season.
If we look at the two offseasons after Reid and before Chip’s coup ousted Howie from power, there were plenty of hits in free agency and the draft, like Connor Barwin, Malcolm Jenkins, Lane Johnson and Zach Ertz.
But there were plenty of misses too, like Bradley Fletcher, Cary Williams, Isaac Sopoaga and, of course, Smith.
“I'll take responsibility for everything that happened when I was the general manager here,” Roseman said in January. “I'm happy to take responsibility for all of that.”
He doesn’t have the GM title now, but it’s clear Roseman is back in power. If that wasn’t clear before, his signings of former draft picks and this week’s trades took away any doubt.
So, he’s off to a good start this offseason, doing the things we already knew he could. But can Roseman surprise everyone and make better decisions when it comes to acquiring personnel?
That’s the real question. Because it’s a lot easier to get rid of the wrong players than it is to find the right ones.