These tweets are three days old, but I was on vacation and didn’t get a chance to write about them:

I don’t think this qualifies as some kind of “I told you so” or after-the-fact type of statement, because McLane had been saying this in the weeks/months leading up to the draft. We at Crossing Broad were also anti-Bijan Robinson at #10 overall, simply because of the value (or lack thereof) of the running back position in the modern-day NFL.

Howie Roseman proved that point emphatically on Saturday, when he traded a 4th round pick and 7th round pick for D’Andre Swift. There’s an outside chance of getting back a comp pick as well, but regardless, the Birds replaced Miles Sanders with Swift and Rashaad Penny for the total cost of a 4th, a 7th, and a little less than three million dollars of cap space. They’ve also got Kenneth Gainwell still on his rookie deal and trusted veteran Boston Scott making peanuts as well.

Because the Eagles were able to replenish at the RB position in a cost-effective way, they didn’t have to burn a top-10 pick on a ball carrier. Instead, they got Jalen Carter, the best defensive tackle in the class and a guy who was a top-3 projection prior to the racing incident that took place in Georgia. Howie then grabbed Nolan Smith at 30 and traded up to get another UGA defensive player in the fourth round, completing on paper one of the best drafts of the weekend.

Back to Jeff –


People seem to think he’s ragging WIP and perhaps Eliot Shorr-Parks specifically, but there was a lot of “rah rah Bijan Robinson” stuff that extended well beyond the sports talk radio airwaves. I noticed a lot of pro-Bijan talk in response to our stories and on Facebook and Twitter as well, mostly framed within the “Eagles should just fucking go for it” argument, which is a counter to the “bad teams usually draft at the top and waste RB talents.” Maybe there was some truth to that, but we’ll never know, and it is objectively hilarious that WIP spent weeks and weeks talking about Bijan, only for him to not even make it to #10 overall.

If anything, sports talk radio is simply guilty of beating a dead horse. The Bijan discussion WAS interesting, and certainly worth talking about, but not to the point where it was the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. It was a good topic, but way too much, and it brought back Dirty 30/Ricky Williams vibes, which should remain forever dormant.

In the end, Howie Roseman did what we thought he would do. He beefed up the lines and went for cost-effectiveness in addressing the running back position.