It’s been an eventful year for the Eagles.
They ended the 2015 season with an interim coach after firing Chip Kelly and spent the next few months dismantling much of what Kelly had done to build the roster during his three years in Philly. Executive vice president of football operations Howie Roseman called it a “challenging” process during Wednesday’s press conference and it was one that kept going right up to the trade of Sam Bradford right before the start of this season.
That trade pushed first-round pick Carson Wentz into the starting job and Roseman said that the silver lining of a 7-9 season is that they “couldn’t be more excited” about what they saw during his rookie season.
“It’s never satisfactory when we are sitting here having a press conference in January,” Roseman said. “But the reality is that when we made this decision to trade up for the quarterback, we’re going to build around him. When we re-signed [Fletcher Cox], we knew we had a 25-year-old we were going to build around. And we are going to stick to our plan. We are going to be disciplined with our process, and we are going to do the right things for this football team.”
One of the areas they need to build up to help Wentz is wide receiver and Roseman seemed to reference Kelly when saying that they don’t have “a DeLorean time machine” to go back to when they had players like DeSean Jackson and Jeremy Maclin. Jackson is headed for free agency, though, and there’s already been chatter about a return engagement with his first NFL team.