Eagles Clips
Free agent offensive lineman Kenyon Green will work out for the Buccaneers on Thursday, Aaron Wilson of KPRC reports.
The Texans made Green a first-round pick in 2022.
Green, 25, started 14 games at left guard as a rookie but missed the 2023 season with a torn labrum in his shoulder. He started 12 games in 2024 before the Texans traded him to the Eagles in the 2025 offseason.
He spent time on the Eagles’ practice squad and later joined the Ravens’ practice squad but did not play last season.
Green has started 23 of 27 career games.
Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts has a record of 57-25 in the regular season, and 6-4 in the playoffs. Against the Buccaneers, however, Hurts has gone 2-4.
Former Tampa Bay linebacker Lavonte David, appearing recently on The Arena, explained the Buccaneers’ approach to playing defense against the Eagles with Hurts at the helm.
David said they focused stopping the running game, and forcing Hurts and the Eagles to beat them in the passing game.
“Our whole game plan was just give him different looks,” David said. “It was one year when we beat him in the playoffs. We was playing straight cover zero. Cover one and cover zero made him want to beat us. . . . In 2023, the game prior to that, they had a great run game. They ran the ball over us . . . So our game plan [for the playoff game] was just, like, you know, we’re gonna make Jalen Hurts beat us, you know, we’re gonna keep him in the pocket, make him make his reads, make him understand what defense he’s seeing and stuff like that, and make him beat us.”
David reasoned that the Eagles didn’t ask Hurts to do much in the passing game. Some may say Hurts is the one who wanted to keep it simple. Still, the revolving door of offensive coordinators surely has been a factor.
Whatever the reasons for the inability of the Eagles to take advantage of Tampa Bay’s focus on stopping the run, the Eagles have struggled against the Buccaneers. And the Buccaneers, as David has explained it, have prioritized neutralizing the running game and daring the Eagles and Hurts to beat them through the air.
Tampa Bay surely isn’t the only team to play the Eagles that way. Few have managed to win 66.6 percent of their games against Philadelphia since Hurts became the starter. With the Eagles breaking in another new coordinator, and presumably installing a McVay-style attack, the franchise is at an inflection point that will require Hurts to do more.
Whether he hasn’t been asked to do more in the past or has resisted, this year the Eagles will be putting more on his plate. What he does with it will say plenty about whether the 27-year-old Hurts finishes the decade as the team’s starting quarterback.
Wednesday’s curiously timed report regarding the role of quarterback Jalen Hurts in the Eagles’ offensive dysfunction seemed to be a message. And the message reportedly has been received.
That’s the assessment from Jeff McLane of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
McLane’s latest written assessment of the situation contains this quote from an unnamed Eagles source regarding Hurts: “He knows this is the last year of his guaranteed money. He knows the cat’s out on some of his baggage. You’ve got to be able to produce. You can’t be near the bottom of the league in passing two years in a row with the amount of talent that we have. It’s not acceptable. . . . And it’s everybody saying it — from [owner] Jeffrey [Lurie] on down. Everybody is on the same page.”
There’s much more in the latest episode of McLane’s Eagles podcast, unCovering the Birds, featuring a lengthy conversation with Inquirer columnist Marcus Hayes. During their chat, it was mentioned that the Eagles use the media in an effort to get through to Hurts — which underscores the notion that the ESPN item didn’t happen spontaneously or without more fingerprints from the organization than a five-year-old eating Cheetos would leave on a glass tabletop.
Hurts is on notice. Coach Nick Sirianni, as Hayes explains, could be on notice, too. Five solid seasons including two Super Bowl berths and one Lombardi Trophy guarantees nothing.
What if last year’s home loss in the wild-card round is followed by a failure to make the playoffs? At the bare minimum, Sirianni would likely be on the hot seat in 2027. And there’s a chance he’d be trying to stave off a pink slip with a new quarterback.
It’s the nature of the NFL beast. Teams are either getting better, or they’re getting worse. For the teams that are getting worse, change is more inevitable than it is possible.
Look at the annual turnover throughout the NFL. Nearly one third of the entire league changed coaches during or after the 2025 season. The higher a team’s standards, the more critical it is to continue to satisfy them.
It is, as former Eagles defensive coordinator and now-former Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon acknowledged when questions about his job security first emerged, the life they have chosen. And they’ve chosen a life of expectations, stress, pressure, and consequences.
In Philly, the expectations remain sky high. The stress remains palpable. The pressure is increasing. The consequences are always lurking.
And the team’s top priority as the 2026 season approaches seems clear. The Eagles want the starting quarterback to understand that he isn’t immune from the possibility of being replaced.
Offseason programs will start getting underway around the NFL next week.
The ten teams that hired new coaches this offseason will be eligible to start working with their players on Monday, April 6. The Ravens are the only team that has set that as their first day of work while the Cardinals, Falcons, Bills, Browns, Raiders, Dolphins, Giants, Steelers and Titans have set Tuesday as their opening day.
All of those teams will also be able to hold a voluntary minicamp later in the spring. Every team is also scheduled to hold a rookie minicamp and a mandatory minicamp over the course of the next few months.
The first two weeks of work for all teams is limited to meetings, strength and conditioning, and physical rehabilitation only. The three-week second phase allows for on-field work, but no full-speed team drills while the third OTA phase allows for team drills, but there is no live contact allowed at any point in the offseason.
Most of the 22 teams with returning coaches will be opening their offseason programs on April 20 or 21. The Broncos have set May 4 as their first day.
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.
Eagles General Manager Howie Roseman said some variation on “A.J. Brown is a member of the Eagles” in response to multiple questions about a possible trade involving the wide receiver this week, but those replies haven’t done much to quite speculation that the team will trade him later this year.
Waiting until after June 1 to make a trade is beneficial to the Eagles’ cap situation and most conjecture about where they’d look to send Brown has centered on the Patriots. Brown played for Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel in Tennessee and New England has an opening at the top of their receiver depth chart after parting ways with Stefon Diggs this month.
The prospect of New England trading for Brown came up again during Vrabel’s media session at the league meetings in Arizona on Tuesday. Per multiple reporters, Vrabel said that the Patriots will “try to do everything we can to strengthen our roster” and that they will look at all avenues to making those improvements.
That could signal that the Patriots will be adding to their receiving corps in next month’s draft, but any addition from that pool is unlikely to put an end to chatter about Brown going from a member of the Eagles to a member of the Patriots by the time Week 1 rolls around.
