PHILADELPHIA _ This isn't Howie Roseman's first rodeo. He's had his football judgment questioned more times than he can count in the years he's been running the Eagles' personnel department. Comes with the territory.
But even he was a little taken aback this spring by the level of furor caused by the team's decision to draft University of Oklahoma quarterback Jalen Hurts in the second round.
His wife's 91-year-old grandfather, who lives in Mobile, Ala., which is just a three-hour drive from Tuscaloosa where Hurts spent three years playing for Nick Saban and the Crimson Tide, sent him a cartoon from a local newspaper that featured Hurts being harassed by an angry mob of Eagles fans.
"It's not every day that you draft the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy and people are mad about it," Roseman joked last month.
They were mad because the Eagles already had one of the league's top quarterbacks on their roster _ Carson Wentz _ and they didn't see the need to waste a high draft pick, the 53rd overall, on another one when they had other needs they could've addressed.
And they were mad because the Eagles had signed Wentz to a $108 million contract extension less than a year earlier, and here they were bringing somebody else in who might cause poor Carson to start looking over his shoulder.
But Roseman and the Eagles knew Wentz would be just fine. He's a big boy. He can cope with a little competition.
