Domo: Maybe Eagles should follow Falcons' lead and take a wideout first
HOUSTON - Does one bold move by Howie Roseman and the Eagles deserve another? One year after trading up for quarterback Carson Wentz, would they be willing to move up again and get Wentz the best wide receiver in the draft - Clemson's Mike Williams?
HOUSTON - Does one bold move by Howie Roseman and the Eagles deserve another?
One year after trading up for quarterback Carson Wentz, would they be willing to move up again and get Wentz the best wide receiver in the draft - Clemson's Mike Williams?
Williams probably will be one of the first five or six players off the board on April 27. The Eagles will own either the 14th or 15th overall pick, depending on the outcome of a late-February coin flip with Indianapolis.
Yeah, yeah, I know. They need a cornerback. But when you make the kind of investment the Eagles made in Wentz, when you've decided he's the guy who's going to take you to the Promised Land, you owe it to him - and to yourself - to surround him with players who can help him maximize his talent as quickly as possible.
You need a template? They'll be playing in Super Bowl LI Sunday.
The Atlanta Falcons.
In 2011, their general manager, Thomas Dimitroff, executed a gutsy - and expensive - moveup from 27 to 6 to grab wide receiver Julio Jones.
To get Jones, they gave the Cleveland Browns - isn't it always the Browns? - their first-, second- and fourth-round picks in that draft, along with first- and fourth-round selections in 2012.
This was a Falcons team that had won 13 games the year before and had been to the playoffs two of the previous three seasons.
But they thought they needed to get their young quarterback, Penn Charter product Matt Ryan, a deep threat.
"We were in a spot where we knew we wanted an extremely explosive football player that was potentially going to keep defenses on their heels," Dimitroff said. "Whether he caught four balls or whether he caught 14 balls.
"We felt Julio was going to make a big-time difference for years to come."
Jones has not disappointed. He has become one of the league's premier wideouts. Four 1,000-yard receiving performances in six years. Two 100-catch seasons in the last three years. Forty touchdown receptions in 79 games.
He averaged 17.0 yards per catch this season. No receiver with 60-plus catches averaged more.
The Falcons led the league in scoring and Ryan had the league's highest passer rating (117.1).
"If you're going to win in this league with a young quarterback, it's imperative that you put talent around him," Dimitroff said.
"We had some tough moments down the stretch the year before we picked (Jones). We talked a lot about how we continue to build the football team and build it where we have explosive players, and how they're going to have to be difference-makers, around Matt Ryan.
"We looked at it good and hard. We just felt we were in a position as an organization, because we had a lot of young guys, to move up for a receiver.
"We weren't looking back. It was very important for us to keep defenses on their heels, whether they were planning for Julio or planning for other players on the field."
Granted, the Falcons' defense was in slightly better shape heading into the 2011 draft than the Eagles' defense is in right now.
They finished fifth in the league in points allowed (the 2016 Eagles finished 13th). They gave up the ninth fewest pass plays of 25 or more yards (the '16 Eagles gave up the most).
And when Dimitroff and his scouts looked at the wide receivers in the draft, they didn't see any difference-makers beyond Jones and Georgia's A.J. Green, who went fourth to the Bengals.
The four wideouts to go after Green and Jones were Jonathan Baldwin (26th to the Chiefs), Titus Young (44th to the Lions), Torrey Smith (58th to the Ravens) and Greg Little (59th to the Browns). Only Smith is still in the league.
The Packers did manage to find a keeper with the final pick in the second round when they took Randall Cobb.
Now, maybe the Eagles think they have some more attractive wide receiver options at 14 or 15 than the Falcons thought they had at 27 six years ago.
Maybe they think the talent gap between Mike Williams and say, Western Michigan's Corey Davis or Washington's John Ross or USC's Juju Smith-Schuster isn't all that big and they can take one of them at 14 or 15.
Or maybe they think they can get their Julio Jones in free agency.
We'll see.
But they'd better get him somewhere. Eagles wide receivers had a total of eight touchdown catches and had only seven catches of 30-plus yards this season.
Matt Ryan averaged a touchdown pass every 14.5 attempts this season. Wentz averaged one every 41.5.
"We have a young (wide receiver) group," Roseman said four weeks ago. "We have a young room. They need to continue to grow, and it's one of the things, among others, that we need to look at."
When Dimitroff was hired as the Falcons' general manager in 2008, his first priority was to construct a high-scoring offense. That's why he drafted Ryan with the third overall pick in '08. That's why he traded up for Jones three years later.
"When I came here, I looked very, very closely at (former Colts, Bills and Panthers GM) Bill Polian," he said. "And I've talked to Bill about this - I always was amazed at the teams they put together and the (offensive) firepower they had.
"I had thought about having a prolific offense from the moment I got here, and we drafted Matt and started to put the tools around him. We always wanted to rise to this spot during those times, those earlier years. Now, we have a young defense that has fed off of the success of our offense."
That's a pretty good template to follow, Howie.
@Pdomo Blog: philly.com/Eaglesblog