The Eagles do many things very well. Among those is their ability to play the media like a pigskin Stradivarius.
Our biggest takeaway from Wednesday’s ESPN report that takes a close look at quarterback Jalen Hurts is this: Why now?
Specifically, why did the story drop at 6:00 a.m. ET on the morning after most of the league left the league meetings in Arizona?
It feels brokered. It feels engineered. The Eagles were willing to give up the goods on the frustrations created by Hurts’s handling of the offense, as long as the story didn’t drop at a time when it would have sparked a feeding frenzy at the NFL’s annual gathering.
The gist of the report is hardly new. Chris Simms has been saying it for years, to the consternation of Eagles fans everywhere. And Derrick Gunn, who has covered the team for decades, pulled back the curtain during the 2025 season regarding Hurts’s reputation for ignoring the plays that are called — and his awareness of his ability to do so, thanks to a contract that makes it very difficult from a cap standpoint to trade him or cut him.
We’ll defer to the full article for the details. Many are technically new, but they don’t feel new. They’re the specific examples of a situation in which the player has power, he’s willing to use it, and no one is able or inclined to push back.
That may now be changing, with the arrival of offensive coordinator Sean Mannion and the offense he’ll be installing. There will be aspects Hurts doesn’t like. Will he be able to continue to resist factors like motion and/or taking snaps from under center?
Will Hurts have the freedom to run whatever play he wants?
The mere fact that the ESPN report exists becomes proof that the Eagles may be on the brink of playing hardball with Hurts. He’s signed through 2028, and after this season the dead-money charge slips to an eye-popping but manageable $67 million, which could be spread over two years with a post-June 1 transaction.
In recent years, several teams have done it. The Broncos with Russell Wilson, the Dolphins with Tua Tagovailoa, and the Cardinals with Kyler Murray.
Wednesday’s article may be a pre-OTA shot across the bow to Hurts that his contract doesn’t translate to lifetime employment, and that if he doesn’t start doing what the Eagles want him to do he may be doing it somewhere else in 2027.
The Falcons are set to make another addition to their personnel department.
Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that they are going to hire Jeff Scott as their assistant General Manager. They hired Matt Ryan as their president of football and Ian Cunningham as their General Manager earlier in the offseason.
Scott has worked for the Eagles for the last five years and has been their vice president of football operations since 2024. Cunningham also worked for the Eagles earlier in his career, but the two men were not in Philadelphia at the same time.
Scott worked for Washington for nine seasons before joining the Eagles.
The Eagles sent a letter to season ticket holders last year telling them that they were looking into options that included both “renovation options” for Lincoln Financial Field as well as “the possibility of a brand new stadium in the region.”
That letter also featured a survey to solicit opinions about the options available to the team, which currently has a lease through 2032 at their current home. Those options remain on the table and Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said on Tuesday that the team is looking at both new NFL stadiums and other venues around the world as they consider their next steps.
“Is there anything we can learn from Nashville and Buffalo?” Lurie said, via Olivia Reiner of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Is there anything we can learn from the renovations in Madrid and Barcelona? It’s really important. I think we want to maximize fan amenities and attract the best possible environment for Philadelphia. And to do that, you’ve really got to do the exploratory research. Don’t rush into it. This is a big decision.”
Lurie said one of the considerations will be the location of the stadium and that “the bottom line is whatever is best for the fans.” Given the potential for a major change, those fans will likely be quite interested in how things develop on the stadium front over the next few years in Philadelphia.
At a time when tanking has become a regular talking point for the NBA, the NFL’s approach typically goes like this: See no tanking, hear no tanking, speak no tanking.
Commissioner Roger Goodell was required to break from that habit on Tuesday, when he was asked about tanking at the press conference that capped the league’s annual meeting.
“We obviously keep a keen focus on it, but we don’t see any evidence of that,” Goodell told reporters, via Omar Kelly of the Miami Herald.
He then pivoted to touting the competitive nature of the league, with “players and coaches who want to win, and they’re out there playing their hearts out.”
But the issue isn’t whether the players and (for the most part) coaches want to win. Tanking can happen when owners and executives who make a business decision about the cost of finishing, say, 3-14 instead of 4-13, and the benefit of landing higher in the draft order.
Late in a lost season, a team can legitimately decide to evaluate younger players, or (as the Raiders did in 2025) shut down key players who had been playing with injuries.
Tanking doesn’t happen often in the NFL, in large part because the season is short enough to minimize the number of games during which a bad team is dog paddling through the final legs of a lost season. But it has happened.
The best example of blatant tanking came in 2014, when the Buccaneers removed a large chunk of their starters to start the second half of a Week 17 game against the Saints. At halftime, the Buccaneers led 20-7. The Saints won the game, 23-20.
“Heck, they lost a game on purpose to us at the end of the season prior with [head coach] Lovie Smith,” then-Saints coach Sean Payton said in 2020. “They forced Lovie [Smith] to take his starters out of the game so they could get the one spot to draft Jameis [Winston].”
Payton explained the dynamic during a subsequent visit to PFT Live. The Buccaneers put down the sword to clinch the Jameis pick by removing their best players. The players who were inserted into the game were trying to win. They weren’t good enough to fend off the Saints.
During that same appearance, Payton also mentioned the Eagles’ decision to replace quarterback Jalen Hurts with Nate Sudfeld in a Week 17 loss to Washington, which didn’t give Philadelphia the first overall pick but bumped them higher in the draft order for 2021.
“Nate has been here four years and I felt he deserved an opportunity to get some snaps,” Pederson said after that game.
The value of having a higher pick in the draft is indisputable. In most years, teams sacrifice significant assets to move higher. For the teams that are out of the playoff conversation, the easier — and cheaper — way to move higher is to lose meaningless games.
Still, the first rule of Tank Club is you do not talk about Tank Club. On Tuesday, Goodell had no choice, given the direct question he was asked. In answering the question, however, he flatly denied the existence of Tank Club.
It may not have many members. It may not have annual meetings. But it exists. And, for the most part, the NFL has been able to conceal it.
Why do you think there’s no draft lottery in the NFL? If the NFL had one, it would become yet another money-for-nothing offseason tentpole, with massive ratings for a prime-time game show aimed at fueling hope for failing teams.
But the mere existence of a lottery becomes an acknowledgement of the temptation to tank. As evidenced by Goodell’s response to Tuesday’s question, the league will never do that.
Even if it’s hiding in plain sight.
The Eagles have added a linebacker to their roster.
The team announced the signing of Chandler Martin. He has agreed to a two-year deal in Philadelphia.
Martin was undrafted out of East Tennessee State last year and he signed with the Ravens. He wound up on the practice squad and was called up to appear in three games on special teams, but his season ended with a torn ACL in Week 13.
Martin was credited with five tackles in his time with Baltimore.
Zack Baun, Jihaad Campbell, Jeremiah Trotter Jr., Smael Mondon, and Chance Campbell will also be competing for playing time at linebacker in Philadelphia.
