Coming into this week, it seemed like the Eagles would trade Carson Wentz at any second.
Well … hasn’t happened yet.
NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport was on the Rich Eisen Show on Peacock Tuesday and mentioned that it felt like there was a ton of momentum building on Friday and Saturday.
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“I was like, ‘Alright, maybe this could happen soon,’” Rapoport said. “But then you get through Saturday, doesn’t happen. You get through the Super Bowl, doesn’t happen. Didn’t happen yesterday.
“This is just kind of my read on the situation: It’s almost like everyone took a deep breath and we’re like, ‘OK, hang on. Why are we hurrying?’ And it felt like everyone kind of went back to their own corners. ‘Let’s figure out what we would give up, what we want to do and what we want for the future?’”
So now we’re left waiting.
Rapoport brought up the hypothetical situation that Wentz doesn’t get traded and said it’s “possible” but also not likely. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Wentz doesn’t get traded at this point.
NFL
Later in the afternoon, Rapoport was on 94WIP with Jon Marks and Ike Reese and brought up a scenario where the Eagles hold on to Wentz until training camp or possibly even into the season if they don’t get the compensation they are looking for. But that’s pretty hard to believe too, that they’d hang on to Wentz and put the team through what would be a tense situation. It feels like they’ve gone too far to turn back now.
As far as the teams involved, Rapoport reiterated that the Colts and Bears are the teams with the most interest. He said other teams might have called but it still appears like the two aforementioned teams are the favorites.
This is going to come down to compensation. The Eagles were reportedly asking for two 1st-round picks and more, which is clearly not going to happen for a player who had such a rapid regression in 2020. But this is how negotiations work; there’s a back-and-forth. And now it feels like we’re waiting for one side to blink.
Another point Rapoport astutely brought up was how the Matthew Stafford-Jared Goff trade didn’t do much to create a template for this Wentz trade. Had Goff or Stafford been traded by themselves, it would have at least given the Eagles and other teams some loose parameters to work from. Instead, the fact that there were so many factors in that trade have made it impossible to isolate the worth of either quarterback.
As a reminder, in that trade, the Rams got Stafford in exchange for Goff, a 2022 1st-round pick, a 2023 1st-round pick and a 2021 3rd-round pick. So the Lions got two 1st-rounders but they are in future years and they also took on Goff’s inflated salary in exchange for Stafford. It’s really hard to isolate any part of this trade and then find a correlation with Wentz.
What kind of compensation will the Eagles end up getting?
“I think they’ll be able to get a first-rounder, that would be very good considering the way Carson played,” Rapoport said. “I just don’t know what levels of more they’re going to be able to get.”
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