Sigh of relief.

The Eagles re-signed Cre’Von LeBlanc on Monday morning, less than 24 hours after they released him in a somewhat head-scratching move.

What was the point of all of this?

It goes something like this:

  1. The Eagles needed a roster spot to make room for running back Jason Huntley, who was picked up via waivers.
  2. At the time, teams were not yet allowed to put players on injured reserve.
  3. LeBlanc qualifies as a vested veteran, which means that is not subject to waivers and instead becomes a free agent.
  4. On Sunday evening, Will Parks and Quez Watkins were added to IR.
  5. That opened up two roster sports, one of which was used to re-sign Cre’Von.

Basically what happened here is that the Eagles did a handshake deal with LeBlanc, like a ‘wink wink, nudge nudge’ kind of thing. They used his vested status to release him and open a roster spot, saying essentially “hey, we can’t move Will Parks and Quez Watkins right now, but as soon as we can, we’ll put them on IR and re-sign you.”

If they had released somebody else, who was subjected to waivers, there would be no guarantee that they could get that player back, since they might be selected by another team. In LeBlanc’s case, he technically COULD have signed with anybody, but they seemingly had this all worked out beforehand.

False alarm.