As I was writing last week’s column, an image from Super Bowl LII, playing on NFL Network on one of my office TVs, caught my eye. There, on the small postgame podium, were Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, GM Howie Roseman and coach Doug Pederson. With them were three players. One was the game’s MVP, Nick Foles. Another, Zach Ertz, scored the game-winning touchdown to dethrone the reigning world champion Patriots.
And the third was in street clothes and didn’t play a snap in the game.
Carson Wentz didn’t know at the time that a year later, after coming back from the torn ACL that cost him a chance to play in those playoffs, he’d be hurt again and watching Foles lead Philly to another playoff win. He didn’t know that a year after , he’d get hurt nine plays into his first, and still only, playoff start. He didn’t know Jalen Hurts, who was the Bama QB benched in the college football title game at the point, would be drafted three months after .
Above all of it, he sure as hell didn’t know that three years, one week and six days after that Super Bowl, he’d be on an emotional morning FaceTime with his GM, with Roseman telling him that his five years as an Eagle were coming to an end. Nor did he know, at that point, that it would be happening, in part, to grant his request for a fresh start.
But that’s where Roseman and Wentz were last week, and the podium scene from 2018 can do plenty to explain how we got here.
The idea, at the time, was the torn ACL that Wentz suffered two months before was merely a speed bump in the then 25-year-old’s ascension to being the centerpiece of Roseman and Pederson’s reimagination of the Eagles’ franchise. No one thought that injury would lead to the end of the road for Wentz. And yet, Wentz being up there—instead of Brandon Graham, Fletcher Cox or Malcolm Jenkins—foreshadowed so much of the awkwardness to come.
The Eagles did the last three years to try and get Wentz back to his MVP form of 2017. They fired, hired and promoted assistant coaches. They mortgaged contracts. They paid him more than Aaron Rodgers got months before him. And they propped him up as the face of the franchise at every turn—even after a game he didn’t play in.
As while we’re digging through the rubble of the last three years between Wentz and the team that traded up twice to get him in 2016, there’s a hard truth you’ll find buried in there. You do all that for a player, and eventually the production has to justify it. If it doesn’t, you risk things getting really weird.
Regardless of who or what you want to blame for it, Wentz’s production didn’t merit the treatment he got, and it hadn’t for a while. So things got weird, and now he’s gone.
We’ve got a lot to dive into on this one.
