PHILADELPHIA — The wait is over, but the questions and repercussions will echo for quite some time.
The Eagles are trading quarterback Carson Wentz to the Indianapolis Colts for a third-round draft pick this year and a conditional second-round pick in 2022, a league source confirmed reports from ESPN and the NFL Network Thursday.
This is far less than general manager Howie Roseman sought when he started entertaining offers, weeks after comparing being without Wentz to losing “the fingers on your hand.”
Roseman initially asked for a haul like what the Lions got from the Rams for quarterback Matt Stafford — two first-round picks, a third-rounder and QB Jared Goff. Those aspirations were widely ridiculed, given Wentz’s horrific performance in 2020 and reports that he resisted attempts to fix his flaws.
The team incurs a $33.8 million dead salary cap charge for 2021 but will face no further obligation, brightening the 2022 cap picture considerably.
The Eagles were left to take the Colts’ offer when Wentz would not agree to go to Chicago, which might have offered a little more, league sources said.
The trade can’t be made official until the 4 p.m. March 17 start of the league year.
This all seemed completely unimaginable before the Eagles spent their second-round 2020 draft pick, 53rd overall, on quarterback Jalen Hurts. And even then, it seemed barely conceivable, a distant rumble of thunder on the horizon.
The skies darkened quickly during the Eagles’ 4-11-1 season in 2020, with Wentz showing a disastrous, uncharacteristic knack for throwing killer interceptions, and the Eagles’ offense unable to produce. Offensive line injuries — 14 different starting combinations — and a lack of healthy weapons that has plagued the team each year after the Super Bowl season of 2017 played a role in the quarterback’s demise. But Wentz made puzzling decisions and missed easy throws as well before being benched in the second quarter of a Dec. 6 loss at Green Bay.
After missing Zach Ertz and John Hightower to kill a series that began with a 41-yard completion to Dallas Goedert, the Eagles down, 20-3, Wentz found himself listening to Doug Pederson telling him that Hurts would quarterback the upcoming set of downs. Wentz, 6 for 15 for 59 yards that day, never took another Eagles snap, finishing the season with an NFL-high 15 interceptions, and 50 sacks. His 72.8 passer rating and 57.4% completion percentage each ranked 34th.
Wentz spoke after the Green Bay game, then never again as an Eagle.
“I didn’t know what the plan was, fully, I was just told that he was going in for the next play and the next series, so I didn’t really know what was going on there. But obviously, that’s frustrating, as a competitor, and just the personality that I have. I want to be the guy out there,” Wentz said. “But it is what it is. They made the call today. At the end of the day, we lost. ... I think, for me, that’s what I’m most frustrated about.”
Wentz heads for a much more promising situation. The Colts were 11-5 in 2020, then saw quarterback Philip Rivers retire. Their head coach is Frank Reich, who was the Eagles’ offensive coordinator in 2016 and 2017. They also employ as a consultant Press Taylor, Wentz’s friend and quarterbacks coach with the Eagles from 2018 through 2020.
Trading up twice in the 2016 draft, from 13th to eighth overall, then to second, to draft Wentz was Roseman’s masterstroke, the key to building the team that won Super Bowl LII, even though Wentz went down with two torn knee ligaments in that season’s 13th game and backup Nick Foles was the Super Bowl MVP.
In retrospect, this circumstance, as odd as any in Super Bowl history, might have helped foretell what was to become. At the time, it seemed just a bump in the road for Wentz, who garnered praise for the assistance he provided Foles and his teammates.
“To me, one of the greatest things about a person that you can say is when you see him celebrating somebody else’s success,” Reich said between the Eagles’ NFC title game blowout of Minnesota and their Super Bowl LII victory over New England. “Human nature tells you that’s hard to do, and it’s been fun to see those two do that. It’s fun to see Carson have the maturity to truly celebrate Nick’s success and understanding how he’s helping this team, and also with the frustration knowing that he wants to be in there.”
The Eagles have never seemed surer of anything than they were when they drafted Wentz, after a draft process that included dinner in Fargo, N.D., with team owner Jeffrey Lurie. As was apparent in the Eagles’ recent coaching search, Lurie is all about process, and when he spoke to reporters after Wentz’s rookie season, that was what he touted.
“It was a very detailed and involved process. I can’t begin to tell you. Some day we can write a book about this if it works out,” Lurie said at the 2017 NFL owners meetings. “Very detailed. Multiple workouts. The testing was physiologically and medically in every way you could imagine and in ways you never even heard of. Eighty pages of reports.”
Those reports didn’t include the possibility of a major knee injury, followed the next year by a back injury that ended Wentz’s season after 11 games, followed the next year by a concussion that ended Wentz’s first playoff appearance in the first quarter. And the reports didn’t foresee Foles winning playoff games two years in a row, dividing the fan base at least slightly before the Eagles let him head off into free agency in 2019.
The reports didn’t account for the frustrations that developed on both sides as the Eagles’ talent declined around Wentz, the coaching changes that took Reich and John DeFilippo, the quarterbacks coach, out of the organization, replaced by coaches who didn’t seem able to get Wentz to shore up his mechanics or buy into Pederson’s offensive vision.
Observers cited Pederson’s disconnect from Wentz as a reason why the only Eagles coach ever to win a Super Bowl was fired, three years later. A few weeks before he benched Wentz, Pederson opined that their futures were linked. But removing Pederson didn’t change Wentz’s mind about wanting to leave.
Whatever Wentz’s future might hold, the fact that the Eagles had to make such a trade after expending five draft picks — including a 2017 first-rounder that eventually was used on quarterback DeShaun Watson — and then making the largest financial commitment in franchise history in 2019, is a stunning debacle for an organization that likes to consider itself among the NFL’s elite.
That the Eagles couldn’t convince Wentz to try to fix his flaws and redeem his promise under the leadership of new coach Nick Sirianni means one of two things must be true: Either Wentz isn’t at all the sort of person the Eagles’ 80 pages of pre-draft reports indicated he was, the person they banked on him being when they committed $128 million after spending three seasons with him, or Wentz, after watching the roster deteriorate around him, has decided that Lurie and Roseman are unlikely to provide him with what he needs to succeed. Neither scenario reflects well upon the organization.
The night Wentz was drafted, April 28, 2016, at the Roosevelt University auditorium in Chicago, someone asked him about being the organization’s highest selection since the Eagles took all-time leading passer Donovan McNabb second overall in 1999.
“That’s the goal,” Wentz said then. “You want to come in and hopefully call Philadelphia home for a long time. Hopefully win games, win Super Bowls.”
Unknown for now is whether Hurts inherits Wentz’s mantle, or the Eagles use their sixth overall pick in the April draft to begin again with a highly-rated prospect.
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