Eagles

To Tank, or Not to Tank? That is Now the Eagles Question

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Oct 19th, 2026 · 12:03 PM EDT

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Let’s set the scene:

• The Philadelphia Eagles are 2-4
• Jalen Hurts is out for the season with DVT and blood clots in his lungs
• Lane Johnson retired after four games
• Cam Jurgens was traded to the Ravens
• Landon Dickerson has played one game
• Saquon Barkley is working his way back from injury
• Tank Bigsby, Eli Stowers, and Grant Calcaterra are on IR
• a slew of other guys are hampered with various injuries
• the NFC East is probably the worst division in football

We’re only six games into the season. Howie Roseman already procured a couple of draft picks for Jurgens, so it’s clear he’s in typical Howie mode, which is to build himself an off ramp and gather assets for a potential roster flip 2-3 years down the road.

A full tank at this point feels premature, or maybe untenable. The Birds are working a lot of guys back from injury. The division totally stinks. New York is in front with wins against Dallas, Tennessee, and Arizona and they lost Jaxson dart for the year. The Cowboys have no defense. Washington has no hope.

Looking at the reality of the situation, the Birds’ D has been good enough to keep them in the last three games, and there’s a thought that if the offense even plays average football through the middle portion of the season, as opposed to pitiful football, that they can find a way to 7-8 wins and get into the postseason as the worst playoff participant. The schedule sees the Birds play five more games against divisional dreck and then the Cardinals, Colts, and Texans, who are nothing special.

It would feel like a huge waste of a great defense to phone it in and immediately fire up the Abrams Tank and start racking up the losses before we even get to Halloween.

But what’s the alternative? That the offense gets healthy, Tanner McKee turns into Nick Foles, and they start lighting up opponents? This team isn’t winning the Super Bowl. Even if you get the first-choice personnel out there, it doesn’t look like the offensive coaches even know what they’re doing. The top two draft picks aren’t doing much. The blocking schemes are whack. The offense didn’t look great in Week 1 or Week 2, even before the injuries began piling up.

When the Birds tanked in 2020, Howie Roseman completed a series of moves that resulted in the acquisition of DeVonta Smith. Did anybody give a shit about Joe Judge or Sal Paolantonio or some clown named Mike Lombardi crying about the integrity of the game after that? No. Because the Eagles reloaded almost immediately and went to Super Bowl 57 and probably should have won that game. Sure, Doug Pederson got fired, and Carson Wentz was traded while the Eagles ate what was, at the time, the biggest dead cap hit in NFL history. But they flipped the page so quickly because Roseman and the front office had the foresight and the stones to pull the trigger and blow up the remnants of the Super Bowl 52 team in order to move things forward, rather than languish in football purgatory.

The Birds’ selection of Jalen Hurts back then was controversial because it signaled that they didn’t truly believe in Wentz. Would they do it again now? Especially after the blood clot reveal? The optics of that would be ROUGH.

However, this looks like a pretty solid QB draft. You look at the top 12 of these early mocks and you see Darian Mensah, Drew Mestemaker, CJ Carr, and Dante Moore. Trinidad Chambliss will probably go in the first round. There might be an opportunity to find the next Jalen Hurts in this draft, but the Eagles also need the next Lane Johnson, and maybe LSU’s Jordan Seaton is the guy. Depends how Markel Bell looks. There’s also Texas EDGE Colin Simmons, who is incredible, and Jeremiah Smith looks like the best college receiver of all time at this current moment.

What’s probably going to happen is that the Eagles will continue to operate as usual through November. They’ll lose a couple of games, maybe win a few. It won’t be an overt tank, but Howie might make another Jurgens-like move depending on the outcome of this three-game divisional opponent stretch. Maybe he unloads one of the guys with a 2027 expiring contract. And then, when it gets closer to the end of the season and the draft jockeying really shapes up, Tanner McKee leaves with a mysterious injury of his own, and Cole Payton starts the season finale. Arnold Ebiketie pulls a “T.Y. McGill” and jumps offside. Then the Birds flush the season, ignore the noise, and take their assets into 2027 and 2028.

This is the way?