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The first was acquiring Lorenzo Booker from the Miami Dolphins for a fourth-round pick. The second was trading away their first-round pick in the draft, the 19th overall, to the Carolina Panthers for the Panthers' 2009 first-round pick, plus two lower-round '08 selections.
The connection between the trade and the Eagles' running back situation? Well, one of the players they could have taken with that selection was Arkansas running back Felix Jones, who went three picks later to the Cowboys.
So far, neither of those two decisions are working out very well for the Eagles. For starters, the '09 pick they got from Carolina is getting devalued faster than the U.S. dollar. The Panthers, a 7-9 team a year ago, have won four of their first five games and are developing the look of a playoff team, which means that pick probably is going to be lower than the one the Eagles traded away.
As for passing on Jones, well, through five games, the rookie already has rushed for 244 yards and three touchdowns on just 27 carries for the 4-1 Cowboys, which averages out to a not-of-this-world 9.0 yards per carry.
In Dallas' win over Cincinnati on Sunday, he had 96 yards on nine carries, including a 33-yard touchdown run. In a Week 3 win over the Packers, he had a 60-yard touchdown run.
Oh, yeah. He's also second in the NFC in kickoff returns (27.5), thanks in large part to that 98-yard scoring burst in Week 2 that helped the Cowboys beat the Eagles.
While Jones is paying impressive early dividends for the Cowboys, the Eagles have gotten little from Booker. He's got just 17 touches in five games and is averaging a puny 2.3 yards per carry and 2.0 yards per reception.
The Eagles acquired Booker because he does a lot of the same things that Brian Westbrook does, though certainly not at the same level. He's a small back with speed who can catch the ball out of the backfield and also flex out and take advantage of coverage mismatches against safeties and linebackers.
Andy Reid envisioned using Booker and Westbrook together a lot in his pass-happy offense, with the thinking being that opposing defenses wouldn't have enough fast people to cover those two, plus two or three wideouts.
But Booker has spent most of the first five games on the sideline. In Sunday's loss to the Redskins, he was on the field for just two offensive snaps. He and Westbrook were in the game together on the first play of the Eagles' second possession, a two-wide receiver formation with Booker also flexed out wide. Donovan McNabb completed an 11-yard pass to Reggie Brown, who ran a slant route.
The Eagles flexed out Booker again on a third-and-7 play in the second quarter and threw to him down the right sideline. It was one of the few deep passes McNabb threw the entire game. Booker caught it, but was out of bounds. Unless I missed a play somewhere, that was it for him. His work day: two snaps, one ball thrown to him, zero catches, zero rushing attempts.
It's not clear why Booker isn't playing more. With Reid, it's often a trust issue. But Booker seems to have a pretty good grasp of the offense, isn't a fumbler and doesn't drop passes. He's not a very good blocker, but neither is Reid's fullback, Tony Hunt. And that's supposed to be Hunt's primary responsibility.
"There are a couple of things he needs to work on,'' Reid said. "He's going to do that. We'll just see how his reps go as we go on here. He has to continue to get better at some of the things he hasn't been asked to do before, and he's working on those.''
While Booker works on whatever it is he needs to work on and Felix Jones runs to daylight in Dallas, the Eagles and their inconsistent offense, which has scored just one second-half touchdown in the last four games, find themselves in a place they didn't expect to be five games into the season.
They are 2-3, in last place in their division and may have to fly to San Francisco this weekend for a prebye-week battle against the 49ers without Westbrook, who fractured two ribs in the loss to the Redskins.
Can the Eagles beat the 49ers without Westbrook? Sure. His backup, Correll Buckhalter, is a capable enough runner. But he's not the home-run hitter that Jones is.
The Eagles obviously had their reasons for not drafting him in April. Both Reid and general manager Tom Heckert seemed to be enamored with the kid at the February scouting combine.
But Westbrook still was 4 months shy of his 29th birthday and coming off a season in which he led the NFL in yards from scrimmage. Maybe they felt they had more pressing needs than another running back, though the fact that they traded away the pick didn't seem to indicate that.
Or maybe they felt that, with Westbrook around, they wouldn't be able to find enough touches for Jones to justify the $9 million in guaranteed money they would have had to give him.
"He's a playmaker,'' NFL Network analyst Mike Mayock said of Jones. "You can find ways to make it work when you have a guy like that. On the surface, you say, 'Wow.' Him and DeSean Jackson and Westbrook on the field together. It sounds sexy. Could it have worked? Sure it could've worked.''
The biggest question scouts had about Jones coming out of college was his durability. The 5-10, 205-pounder shared the rushing workload at Arkansas with Darren McFadden and many wondered whether he could withstand a 20-carry-a-game licking in the NFL. Mayock wondered the same thing.
"I felt both he and McFadden needed to be share-the-load type of backs in the NFL,'' he said. "The thing about Jones, he's a thickly built kid as opposed to a real slight kid like Booker. He's built more like Westbrook.
"I'm not sure if he's ever going to be a 20-carry-a-game guy. He has to play in a [two-back] system like he did at Arkansas and like he is now in Dallas. I could be wrong about that, though. People thought the same thing about Westbrook when he came out.''
For the Eagles, the point is moot. They made their running back decisions 5 1/2 months ago. Now they've got to live with them.
Donovan McNabb sent rookie wide receiver DeSean Jackson a loud and clear message Sunday. Jackson, who caught 22 passes in the Eagles' first four games, had one reception for 8 yards against the Redskins. He ran a sloppy slant route in the second quarter that resulted in a near-interception by Carlos Rogers and never saw the ball again. Jackson was on the field for 18 of the Eagles' next 24 snaps. McNabb threw 16 more passes in the game. None were in Jackson's direction. *
Send e-mail to pdomo@aol.com
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