Wentz will have to be better than good to make Eagles look smart
THE STRONGEST argument in favor of everything that you have witnessed over the last month came about 12 minutes into Howie Roseman's question and answer session on Thursday night. After spending much of the news conference extolling the blue-collar virtues of the man he selected with the No. 2 pick in the draft, the Eagles' football operations chief made an important point when he noted that a team that finds a long-term solution at quarterback does so for a very long term.
THE STRONGEST argument in favor of everything that you have witnessed over the last month came about 12 minutes into Howie Roseman's question and answer session on Thursday night. After spending much of the news conference extolling the blue-collar virtues of the man he selected with the No. 2 pick in the draft, the Eagles' football operations chief made an important point when he noted that a team that finds a long-term solution at quarterback does so for a very long term.
"It's not a decision just for the moment," Roseman said after pointing out that a team that finds a long-term answer at quarterback can go through multiple cycles of building around that position.
To illustrate his point, Roseman pointed to the 2004 draft, when the Chargers, Giants and Steelers landed Philip Rivers, Eli Manning and Ben Roethlisberger.
"Twelve years later, they are still drafting to surround them," Roseman said.
Even if the first-, second- and third-round picks that the Eagles will sacrifice over the next three drafts end up hampering their ability to build a playoff-caliber team around Carson Wentz, it will prove to be a quickly forgotten pothole if the immensely impressive North Dakota State product fulfills the potential that his physical tools have bestowed upon him.
Carson Wentz will need to be better than Joe Flacco. He will need to be better than Steve McNair. He will need to be better than Phil Simms and Ken O'Brien and Doug Williams and Dan Pastorini.
For any of this to have a chance of working, Wentz will need to be the best first-round draft pick to ever come from a non-Division I-FBS school. That's the situation the Eagles have created for their rookie. He cannot merely be solid. He will need to be the kind of player who can take any collection of players and make them a playoff contender, the way only a handful of guys have been able to do (Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Andrew Luck, Peyton Manning and Roethlisberger, to name a few). Because the Eagles have put themselves in a position where they will need the best of fortune even to put an adequate team around him.
But if Wentz does not reach that potential - or at least come very, very close to it - the Eagles will have wasted at least a half decade only to find themselves worse off than they were before. There really isn't much of an in-between. That is the danger here, and it isn't clear if Roseman and Doug Pederson fully grasp it.
On Thursday night, both men shrugged off such concerns in their own way, Pederson most directly.
"We didn't think he was a risk," the first-year head coach said.
I know, I know. What else do you expect him to say. But the risk is the story here, and if the Eagles have underestimated it, this fan base could be in for a very long decade.
Make no mistake: Wentz has the physical tools to be great. It isn't just his size, which, at 6-5 and 237 pounds, is as prototypical as it gets. It's the speed and fluidity with which he plays in spite of that size. All of the attributes that Pederson and Roseman rattled off on Thursday night show themselves in his style of play, particularly when he is on the run.
But North Dakota State is a long way from the National Football League, and all you have to do is pop in some tape to see it. Even to the naked eye, the speed - or lack thereof - of the game is jarring. No doubt, the Wentz you see on film is a guy who clearly belongs somewhere better than his surroundings, both in technical ability and his size/speed combination. But attempting to project him doing the things he did against overmatched Division I-FCS opponents is little more than a guessing game. In such situations, confirmation bias often fills that void with a false certainty, and there were plenty of moments Thursday when you wondered just how much this new ruling triumvirate. (Roseman-Pederson-Jeffrey Lurie) allowed its desire for the franchise's next Donovan McNabb to affect its evaluation of Wentz's probability of success. As Roseman and Pederson talked through their bromance with Wentz, they used words like "grit," "fortitude," "blue collar," and "infectious." They talked about the fact that he was a valedictorian in high school. Pederson went so far as to say, "The guy bleeds winning."
That sound was Sam Bradford throwing up.
Not to underestimate the value of any of those attributes, nor to diminish Roseman-Lurie-Pederson's abilities for on-the-spot psycho analysis, but none of those attributes mean a thing if the kid can never learn to play against a live NFL rush while facing live NFL pass defenders. At times, it sounded as if the Eagles had traded up for the No. 2 pick in the 2010 draft and selected Tim Tebow. I mean, if Carson Wentz bleeds winning, then his blood is made out of Tebow, right? Except all of the blue-collar want-to in the world couldn't erase the fact that Tebow could neither throw the ball nor determine the proper place to attempt to throw it.
Point is, Philadelphia may very well fall in love with Wentz's personality the way Roseman-Lurie-Pederson clearly did. But all that will do is make them hate Bradford more. Once Wentz actually becomes the starter, the only thing that matters is whether he can do in the NFL as he did in North Dakota. The length of a franchise quarterback's career is inversely proportional to this town's patience for anything less than that.
@ByDavidMurphy
Blog: philly.com/PattisonAve