Key questions await Eagles at Scouting Combine

INDIANAPOLIS - Howie Roseman and Doug Pederson are scheduled to speak to reporters Wednesday afternoon at Lucas Oil Stadium, kicking off what promises to be a fascinating NFL Scouting Combine and draft season for the Eagles.

The team with the 13th overall pick has had no full-time player personnel head since Ed Marynowitz was dismissed, along with head coach Chip Kelly, two months ago. Roseman, the executive vice president of football operations, was heavily involved in scouting before Kelly insisted he be removed from the personnel side entirely in January 2015. This season, Roseman made no college trips, conferred with no scouts. He commands a scouting operation that was completely remodeled over the past few years to fit Kelly's concepts, which heavily emphasized certain key physical measurements and mandated that prospects who didn't fit those parameters be excluded from the evaluation process.

At this point, do the Eagles really have all the information they'd like on every prospect? Is what Pederson wants in a player very different from what Kelly wanted?

Currently, Roseman's scouting staff is headed by semiretired former NFL general manager Tom Donahoe, who apparently will go back to being an adviser when Roseman is able to hire a full-time personnel chief. Donahoe will be part of the Eagles' party in Indianapolis, a team spokesman confirmed. It's unclear how much scouting he took part in last season, when his title was "senior football adviser" - Donahoe's name seldom came up during the Kelly regime.

Since regaining power, Roseman has made it clear he thinks the path to the Super Bowl is through drafting and developing your own talent, players who grow up in your organization's culture and have a stake in maintaining it. This draft is critical for a team that hasn't drafted an offensive lineman the last two years, and whose 2015 starting quarterback is scheduled to become a free agent March 9.

Ramping up the first-round stakes is the fact that the Eagles lack a second-round draft pick, which would have been 43rd overall, had Kelly not tossed it into the trade for Sam Bradford last March. After the first round, the Eagles pick 77th and 79th in the third round.

Even if you have designs on bringing back Bradford, at least for a few years, it might be prudent to draft a quarterback 13th overall and develop him. But then you wouldn't be addressing any other needs until the third round.

On a conference call with reporters Tuesday, NFL Network lead draft analyst Mike Mayock said that if he were the Eagles, he'd be thinking first about the quarterback situation. (Of course, by draft time we'll know whether Bradford is going to return or not, which might have a lot to do with their sense of urgency at QB.) Mayock said that if Memphis QB Paxton Lynch is available at 13, and "if they believe he's the guy," then "they better take him."

Mayock seems to think North Dakota's Carson Wentz, the late-blooming College Football Championship Subdivision QB who seems to have intrigued many Eagles fans, will be gone by the time the Birds are on the clock. Mayock said he thinks Wentz's ceiling is comparable to that of Colts quarterback Andrew Luck, the No. 1 overall pick in 2012.

Quarterbacks, especially, teams judge more off their game tape than their performance in combine drills, but this week is notable in that all the major prospects are scheduled to throw in Indianapolis, which is rare.

Mayock added that "after QB, it's OL for me," that the Eagles need to come out of the draft with two or three offensive linemen. (Here again, free agency might be a mitigating factor, though from what Roseman has said, the Eagles are back to being leery of top-of-the-market imports, as they were for a few years before Kelly swept that strategy off the table last year.) Right now, 13 would seem to be a decent spot for drafting someone like Notre Dame offensive tackle Ronnie Stanley or Michigan State offensive tackle Jack Conklin.

Mayock said he sees four offensive tackles going in the first round, including Conklin, whom he pegged as a right tackle in the NFL. (Of course, the Eagles could stash Conklin at guard for a year or two, as Jason Peters' career winds down, then move Lane Johnson to left tackle and play Conklin on the right.)

If the Eagles do retain Bradford, they might wait until, say, the third round to draft a developmental quarterback. Nabbing a starter that late is usually a pie-in-the-sky dream, Russell Wilson being a very rare exception, but this year Mayock and other analysts believe there's a group of intriguing QB prospects who will come off the board sometime after the first round.

Mayock evoked the example of Redskins quarterback Kirk Cousins, who went in the fourth round in 2012, the same year Washington drafted Robert Griffin III second overall.

"That middle-round guy that can get you to the playoffs . . . There's a bunch of those guys," Mayock said, listing Stanford's Kevin Hogan, Arkansas' Brandon Allen, Mississippi State's Dak Prescott and North Carolina State's Jacoby Brissett. After that group, Mayock listed "wild cards," such as Penn State's Christian Hackenberg and Ohio State's Cardale Jones.

Mayock said he feels interior defensive line is this draft's deepest position, which doesn't help the Eagles a whole lot; their d-line figures to be their strongest group, and defensive tackle Fletcher Cox is their best player.

When Pederson and Roseman speak Wednesday, they undoubtedly will be pressed for updates on Bradford. Bleacher Report's Jason Cole asserted Tuesday that the NFL consensus has Bradford returning to the Eagles, even if he tests free agency first. The Eagles haven't franchised Bradford, for about $20 million this year, and aren't expected to do so, although they have until March 1 to decide. Cole questioned whether Bradford, off two years of injury followed by a sharp, solid second half of 2015 with the Eagles, can command franchise-QB money on the free-agent market.

For Eagles fans, who seem split on Bradford, how the team handles his situation might give insight into whether Roseman and Pederson really believe they can compete right away, or if they are regrouping and rebuilding.

bowenl@phillynews.com

@LesBowen

Blog: philly.com/Eaglesblog