Philadelphia Eagles

Plenty of crazy theories end up on social media. Not many of them make it into the mainstream consciousness.

A crazy theory regarding the reason for the A.J. Brown trade out of Philly went mainstream on Tuesday, when Mike Garafolo of NFL Network made general reference to it, before explaining that the team disputes it.

Specifically, Eagles senior advisor to the general manager/chief security officer/gameday coaching operations exec Dom “Big Dom” DiSandro debunked it.

“Let me also hit the other elephant now,” Garafolo said. “This talk of what’s happening, and why the trade happened, A.J. Brown, Haason Reddick, and you’ve seen it probably on social media. I talked to Big Dom about this, OK? And Big Dom knows what’s happening in that entire building, and he was adamant that that is not true. There is no truth to that. Haason Reddick is no longer an Eagle, because Haason Reddick wanted a huge payday. And A.J. Brown is no longer an Eagle for reasons that have nothing to do with what’s circulating online. He could not have been more adamant. That story is complete and utter, bupkis.”

So what’s circulating online? We asked Garafolo, and he passed along the link to it. It attempts to explain the reasons for Brown’s eventual disenchantment with quarterback Jalen Hurts.

On Monday, coach Nick Sirianni was asked whether the relationship between Brown and Hurts “was ever a problem in managing the team and impacted on the field?”

Here’s Sirianni’s full response, from the transcript circulated by the team:

“Relationships are so, so important. I think sometimes that can get misconstrued that everyone has to be best friends and that’s just not the case. There’s a lot of guys on a football team. There’s a lot of different personalities. What has to be understood is that everybody has a common goal. What also has to be understood is that everybody has a common goal that they need each other to accomplish. It’s like, ‘Yeah, we all want to win. Yeah, we all want to be All Pro. Yeah, we all want . . . our second, third contract,’ but you also, in that, need others to help you accomplish those things. There’s no other sport, in my opinion, out there that’s more obvious than in football.

“Again, yeah, you strive to get to know each other. When we talk about coming together as a football team, how do you do that? Well, there’s no shortcut in the time that you spend with each other getting to know each other, what makes each other tick, why they do it, what they like to do, whatever it may be, you get that through shared hardships. Only part of that is like, ‘Hey, a little time —' But then part of it is you get that togetherness through shared hardships going through tough times together. Then the other part of that is you get that togetherness from trust that’s built from consistently doing what you’re supposed to do on a daily basis. ‘Man, I just trust that guy that he’s going to do the right things at all times.’

“Relationships, togetherness sometimes look in the sense, at times, of, ‘Man, Landon [Dickerson] was in Jordan [Mailata’s] wedding.’ Sometimes it looks like that. And then sometimes it’s just, ‘Hey, this shared mission of the team.’ I think it can look a lot of different ways, but it is so important that we all understand that we have a shared mission and that we need each other to get to where we want to go. We need each other. Not in this sport can we do it alone.

“If you want to do it alone, you’ve got to pick another sport. But I say to them, sometimes I feel bad because I love the sport of tennis, but I’m like, ‘Hey, this ain’t tennis and none of you are built to play tennis. A lot of you guys aren’t built-- [kicker] Jake Elliott was built to play tennis, but a lot of you guys weren’t built to play tennis, so you can’t switch, so you need each other to get to where you want to go.’”

The response wasn’t responsive to the question asked. It’s up to the reader to decide why the ensuing word salad didn’t focus on the specific inquiry that was posed to Sirianni.

Whatever the reason, something happened between Brown and Hurts. When Brown arrived four years ago, they were close. Working together as receiver and quarterback in a shared effort to win as many games as possible should make them closer, not distant.

Especially since they went to two Super Bowls and won one during their time together.

Eagles right tackle Lane Johnson took a little time after the end of the 2025 season before announcing that he’d be back for his 14th year with the team, but he ultimately announced his plans to play in February.

That was around the time Johnson began feeling close to 100 percent after the foot injury that kept him out of the final eight games of last season. Johnson said at a Tuesday press conference that he pushed to get back ahead of the team’s playoff loss to the 49ers, but “couldn’t function” and didn’t want that to be the final chapter of his career.

“I thought I was having a really good season last year and there was nobody more disappointed than me not being able to come in and play to finish it out,” Johnson said. “I didn’t want to go out that way.”

Johnson’s return comes without longtime offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland, who left the Eagles this offseason. He called the news of Stoutland’s departure “a shocking ordeal,” but thinks the team’s new offense gives us “the ability to be more than we were last year” and it may give Johnson a chance to go out on a higher note than he would have if he retired this offseason.

A.J. Brown has not been a member of the Patriots for too long. But he’s getting more integrated into his new surroundings.

Head coach Mike Vrabel said on Tuesday that things have been going “good” for Brown since he arrived.

“I think the weekend probably served him well to be able to take a deep breath and get some rest,” Vrabel said in his press conference, via transcript from the team. “I am sure it has been a whirlwind for him, but he is excited about learning the system and eventually moving around and doing different things.

“I think it has been great just having him around and continuing to integrate himself into our football team.”

The Patriots are going through mandatory minicamp this week. The club will start training camp the week of July 24.

Throughout the offseason, Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni has had to field questions about A.J. Brown’s future with the team.

The saga will now be put to rest, as Brown has officially been traded to the Patriots.

Speaking to the media for the first time since the deal went down, Sirianni was complimentary of Brown’s time with Philadelphia. But he quickly pivoted to players who are currently on the team.

“I would say there was a lot of good years here, and done a lot of good things with AJ here — two times in the Super Bowl, I think he was [an] All-Pro multiple times, Pro Bowl multiple times,” Sirianni said. “So, I would say it was a good run.

“But, really excited about that room that we have. DeVonta Smith has had a really good offseason, has had five good years of being an Eagle as well. Very, very productive. And excited that he’s going to get extra opportunities that he works so hard to… that people convert that. Really excited about Makai and where he is this offseason and just his ability to catch the football, his toughness. I think that’s a great addition to that room.”

Sirianni continued on to mention Dontayvion Wicks, Hollywood Brown, Elijah Moore, Darius Cooper, and Johnny Wilson by name.

As for Sirianni’s input on the trade itself, the head coach said he and General Manager Howie Roseman discuss everything.

“What a good teammate that I have with Howie Roseman to be able to go to battle with,” Sirianni said. “So many things that [Brown] did that [were] good for our football team and always will wish him the best of luck. But, like I said, really excited about the guys in that room and where we are. But this is a team game, to your question, and every decision that I make and decisions that Howie makes, we talk to each other about it.”

A.J. Brown made his official farewell to Philly on Monday, when he was traded to the Patriots. He returned to the building to get the last of his things later in the week, and he left something behind.

On a wall with photos of the team’s Pro Bowl player, Brown applied his signature. He added a message to it.

“The best to ever play here,” Brown wrote, via Mike Garafolo of NFL Network. “Always open.”

One of the issues during his final year in Philly was that he was at times open but the ball didn’t come his way. Did that trace to whatever caused the relationship between Brown and quarterback Jalen Hurts to change?

At this point, it doesn’t matter. Brown will now attempt to be “always open” for quarterback Drake Maye. Which could help Maye take the next step from No. 2 in the MVP voting to No. 1.

More than 90 percent of the players selected in the 2026 NFL draft have signed their rookie contracts. Among the players who remain unsigned, there are two big clusters, at the top of the third round and the top of the fourth round.

The first six players drafted in the third round are still unsigned: Cardinals quarterback Carson Beck, Broncos defensive tackle Tyler Onyedim, Raiders defensive end Keyron Crawford, Eagles tackle Markel Bell, Bears tight end Sam Roush and 49ers edge rusher Romello Height.

The first seven players drafted in the fourth round are also unsigned: Raiders cornerback Jermond McCoy, Bills tackle Jude Bowry, Jets defensive tackle Darrell Jackson Jr., Cardinals defensive tackle Kaleb Proctor, Chargers wide receiver Brenen Thompson, Texans guard Febechi Nwaiwu and 49ers defensive tackle Gracen Halton.

Those 13 players make up the majority of the 2026 draft picks who haven’t signed their rookie contracts yet.

Bills General Manager Brandon Beane said on the team’s YouTube show that high third and fourth-round picks are encouraged by the players’ union to ask for contract provisions that the players in the previous round are getting.

“A lot of years it was the third round took forever,” Beane said. “The union is constantly trying to push down everything from the second round into the third round, and then the third round to make the fourth round better. In this CBA it feels like the fourth round has become more difficult.”

Beane said he understand why Bowry’s agent doesn’t want him to sign until he sees what other fourth-round picks can get, but he thinks it will work itself out before training camp.

“Sometimes agents are a little afraid to do something if the guy in front of them hasn’t done it,” Beane said. “They don’t want to look bad. It’s all recruiting. Jude’s been great. Until it’s done it’s not done, but we’re optimistic.”

A handful of first- and second-round picks also remain unsigned. Every player picked in the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds has signed.

From Thursday afternoon until Saturday morning, I partially unplugged for the wedding of my niece. I’m back in the saddle, and I was taken aback by something that became a thing on Thursday.

It became a given in multiple media circles — from those who have a history of warping reality for engagement (like “Dov Kleiman,” who isn’t really Dov Kleiman but whoever it was that bought Kleiman’s Twitter account more than two years ago) to those who know or should know better (like former ESPN personality Trey Wingo).

Both “Kleiman” and Wingo (and more than a few others) claimed that Patriots receiver A.J. Brown, during his recent interview with Maria Taylor, admitted that he “leaked” stories to the media in an effort to motivate the Eagles.

Brown never said that. Allow me to repeat this, with emphasis: BROWN NEVER SAID THAT.

Here’s the key exchange in the interview. Maria Taylor asked Brown if he felt that the picture painted of Brown in Philly made him out to be a villain.

“I wouldn’t say ‘a villain,’ because some of the things that was done, it was done purposely to give us a push, you know?” Brown said. “I know if I said something in the media, I know it’s gonna propel us to work on it, because now everybody’s talking about it. You know, so it’s like are we gonna really — are we gonna fix it or not? We can’t keep saying, ‘It’s the standard, it’s the standard.’ And we’re not trying to truly get better.

“I’m not saying that we weren’t, but I know if you say what you need to say in the media — which I won’t do that anymore — but it gives everything legs, and legs . . . to push everybody to be better. Because pressure isn’t always a bad thing. It can also be a good thing, too. It just depends on how you look at it. And we had guys in the locker room — which was, honestly, I feel like it was OK to do because we had guys and a lot of them who were men you know, and it’s like, yeah, ‘I know I need to do this. I need to do that,’ including myself.

“So you felt like basically some of the things you would say in the media in ways were a strategy in hopes of helping your team become the best version of themselves?” Taylor said.

“Nothing I would say was for personal gain,” Brown said. “It was always to help the team win, and try to be our better self.”

One of the best examples of that dynamic happened in November, when Brown addressed at his locker the Twitch stream comment to “get rid of me” from your fantasy team.

“We can’t just keep slapping a Band-Aid over the defense doing their job and getting us out of trouble,” Brown told reporters the next day. “At what point are we going to pick up our slack as an offense that we say we’re so great? . . . And that’s what I’m getting at. It’s not about, ‘I don’t care about winning, all I care about is stats.’ No. It’s been week after week sometimes we’re not contributing, we’re not doing our job on offense. You can’t keep slapping a Band-Aid over that and expect to win late in the year and think you’re going to go to that at the end of the year. It’s not going to fucking happen.”

At the time, our position was that Brown was sufficiently selfless in his desire for the offense to improve that he was willing to be labeled as selfish regarding comments that many viewed as the same-old gripes from a diva receiver who wants the quarterback to just give him the damn ball.

The message went beyond Brown’s stats. The offense wasn’t growing. It wasn’t evolving. It was hiding behind the fact that the Eagles were winning games, thanks in large part to their defense. (Two days earlier, the Eagles had scored only 10 points in a victory at Green Bay.)

Brown’s concern was that, if the offense didn’t get better, it would lose when it counted. And he was right — the Eagles couldn’t score against the 49ers with the season on the line in the wild-card round of the playoffs, thanks to the ill-advised decision (reportedly suggested by quarterback Jalen Hurts) to run “four verticals” for the second straight play.

The moment underscored the offense’s failure to grow and adapt. That’s the concern Brown accurately expressed in November. And he said it on the record. He didn’t “leak” anything.

Most importantly, Brown never told Maria Taylor that he leaked stories to the media to motivate teammates. Brown didn’t operate in the shadows. He stood in the spotlight and said what he needed to say.

It’s a huge difference. The notion that Brown “leaked” stories creates the impression that he was violating the code of the locker room, that he was going rogue and potentially sabotaging the team.

Everyone who claimed based on the actual interview — or who amplified the contention without checking an interview that is available for anyone to watch on YouTube — should revise their tweets and their stories. In the end, a surprising number of outlets ran with the false characterization of Brown’s comments.

It’s sloppy. It’s lazy. It’s wrong. And it continues, for as long as the tweets and links claiming Brown “leaked” stories are not revised or deleted.

Let’s see how many, if any, of these outlets will now do the right thing.

The Eagles signed free agent defensive tackle Zion Wilson, the team announced.

Ryan Fowler of NBC Sports Philadelphia reports that Wilson’s deal includes a $25,000 signing bonus and $225,000 in guaranteed money.

Wilson played at East Carolina before transferring to Virginia after last season, but the NCAA denied his sixth-year waiver for 2026 last week.

He began his career as a walk-on offensive lineman before switching to the defensive line before the 2024 season.

Wilson appeared in 13 games in 2024, playing 70 snaps on special teams, and became a full-time starter at defensive tackle in 2025. He totaled 42 tackles, 10 tackles for loss and seven sacks last season.

In a corresponding move, the Eagles cut wide receiver Brandon Hayes.

Olivia Reiner, an Eagles beat writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was named the 2026 Terez A. Paylor Emerging Writer Award winner by the Professional Football Writers of America.

Reiner, the seventh Paylor Award winner, is the first person affiliated with the Philadelphia Inquirer to receive the award.

The Paylor Award recognizes a young NFL writer who carries on the legacy of Paylor through his or her work ethic, professionalism, and dedication to the craft and commitment to improving diversity in NFL media. Paylor, the former Yahoo! Sports and Kansas City Star football writer, died in 2021 at the age of 37.

Reiner joined the Philadelphia Inquirer as the Eagles beat reporter in 2023. Before she joined the Eagles beat, she was the Flyers beat reporter at the Inquirer from 2021-23, earning NSMA Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year honors in 2023.

From 2019-21, she worked as a sports multimedia reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where she covered the Packers, Brewers and Bucks. Her video coverage of the Packers earned 2019 APSE top-10 honors. She also covered the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for USA Today.

The other 2026 finalists for the Paylor Award were Ashley Bastock (cleveland.com/Cleveland Plain Dealer) and Giana Han (Baltimore Banner).

Four years after the Eagles gave up a first-round pick and a third-round pick to acquire receiver A.J. Brown from the Titans, the Eagles acquired a first-round pick and a fifth-round pick when giving up the balance of his contract in a trade with the Patriots.

Along the way, the Eagles went to a pair of Super Bowls, winning one of them.

All in all, the transaction was a big win for the Eagles. Especially on the back end, when it had become obvious that the relationship could not continue.

The Eagles finagled real value for Brown at a time when the Eagles had no real options. No one was offering a first-round pick for Brown in 2027 — in part because everyone knew Brown wanted to go to New England, and only to New England. With the Eagles unable to credibly claim that they simply would have kept Brown on the team in 2026 (after signing two receivers, trading for one, and using a first-round pick on another), the Patriots arguably could have driven a much harder bargain.

Ultimately, Philly’s only leverage came from the timing of the deal. By doing it promptly on June 1, the Patriots got Brown in the door with two weeks of OTAs and a mandatory minicamp remaining in the offseason program. This gives Brown a chance to get his feet wet in the Josh McDaniels offense before training camp opens.

Still, a first-round pick (in 2028) and a fifth-round pick (in 2027) are a lot to give up for a player who turns 29 on June 30, whose knee(s) caused the Rams not to make a trade in March, and who has a contract with an APY of $32 million.

Then there’s the situation involving Patriots coach Mike Vrabel. Ben Volin of the Boston Globe writes that "[i]t would be naïve, though, not to consider another reason for making the trade now — to distract from the episode involving Vrabel and Dianna Russini. . . . It certainly seems the Patriots were so desperate to move past the Vrabel-Russini story that they were willing to overpay for Brown.”

The theory that doing the deal quickly helps turn the page on the Vrabel-Russini situation is worth considering. But the league-wide notion that Brown was destined to be traded to the Patriots existed weeks before the interlocking-fingers photo emerged in early April (due in part to reporting from Russini). Also, the Vrabel-Russini story has largely subsided, and it will stay that way unless and until she tells her story publicly in a way that creates one or more new complications for Vrabel.

The Patriots always seemed to be the likely destination, and June 1 always seemed to be the right time to get it done, since it created a much lower dead-money charge for the Eagles in 2026. The only question is whether the Eagles could have put the screws to the Patriots by slowing the process down beyond June 1 (perhaps keeping Brown through the end of the New England offseason program) in order to get the terms they wanted.

If the Eagles had decided to play hardball in order to get more from the Patriots, Brown could have done the same. He could have shown up for the offseason program and/or mandatory minicamp. He could have insisted on being able to participate in drills. He could have said whatever he wanted to say about the situation, creating a distraction for the Eagles at a time when they’re hoping to eliminate such issues, not add to them.

However you slice it, it’s a win for the Eagles. It could become a win for the Patriots, if Brown helps them win, and if that 2028 first-round pick lands low in the range of 32 selections.

For now, it’s a very good outcome that could become a lot better for the Eagles (if the Patriots fail in 2027), and an open question as to whether the Patriots will be able to parlay Brown’s arrival into a coup.