National Guy Says Eagles Had the #1 Draft Class
Dane Brugler is the NFL Draft specialist at The Athletic. I’m pretty sure it’s all he does all year, just study college football players and publish draft-related stories. Each season he does a draft guide in PDF format and the 2021 version clocked in at 267 pages, each containing about 700 words. That means we’re looking at something like 175,000 words, which not even Anthony can sniff in his epic Flyers recaps.
Anyway, Brugler loved the Eagles’ draft. How much? He ranked them #1 in the entire league.
His criteria was: “quality of talent added and the value of where players were taken,” and he wrote this about the Birds:
Favorite pick: Landon Dickerson, OG/C, Alabama
The Eagles had no shortage of candidates here, which is the main reason they are No. 1 on my list. But Dickerson gets my vote because of his combination of high-end talent at any of the interior line positions and his impact in the locker room. His injury history is troublesome, but well worth the risk.Day 3 pick who could surprise: Zech McPhearson, CB, Texas Tech
This was a tough choice between McPhearson, Gainwell and Tuipulotu, but the cornerback is the pick because I thought he went widely underrated throughout the process. The Penn State transfer looks comfortable in both man and zone and shows outstanding fluidity and toughness to mirror receivers.
See, now this is funny, because Dickerson and McPhearson were the consensus most-hated picks among Eagles fans and local reporters. A double-ACL tear interior lineman? A transfer cornerback coming out of the Big 12? It’s fascinating how Brugler loved these two picks while Eagles fans were really into DeVonta Smith and Kenneth Gainwell.
Nobody studies more film and does more draft work than Brugler, so I guess we should put more weight into his words than those of Johnny from Mayfair. But at the end of the day, opinions are just that, and the draft is always a crap shoot, so maybe the Eagles end up having the worst draft class ever when he look back at 2021 in a few years’ time.
We shall see!