We’re only on the second week of Jalen Hurts serving as the Eagles’ starter at QB, ahead of Carson Wentz, and already there’s reports of discontent. ESPN’s Adam Schefter penned a story on Sunday saying Wentz is ready to move on from Philly if he’s relegated to a backup job.
It all feels a tad premature.
There are so many problems that could prevent the Eagles from trading or cutting Wentz (and we’ll detail those in a second). In fact, there are enough obstacles to wonder whether he’ll need to play (or not play) on the Eagles’ roster in 2021, no matter whether he’s content or not. There may be nowhere for Wentz to go.
My biggest issue with these rumblings about Wentz is that we’ve barely seen what Hurts can do. He upset a New Orleans Saints team that was starting Taysom Hill at quarterback. It was an exciting and impressive performance. It was hardly meaningful enough to tell us whether Hurts will be the starter in 2021. It’s silly for rumors of Wentz’s frustration to start emerging at this point. If these rumblings are true, Wentz’s camp is picking a fight with the Eagles much sooner than is necessary.
But if Hurts does excel, Philly faces an awfully tough situation. Cutting him is out of the question — the transaction would incur too much dead cap. (And my colleague Charles McDonald dove deeply into these issues already.) A trade would be less damaging from a cap standpoint — but it wouldn’t come without additional problems for Philly. If the Eagles wanted to part ways with Wentz, they could trade him after June 1. That would alleviate some of the dead cap. They’d take on $9.2 million in dead cap for 2021 (with $25.4 million in cap savings) before incurring a $24.5 million dead cap charge in 2022.
The problem, however, is that Philadelphia wouldn’t be able to trade Wentz without sending draft capital to make the trade palatable to whatever team agrees to take on the rest of Wentz’s deal — and his inconsistent play.
So the Eagles would take on dead cap, the most in NFL history, per PhillyVoice.com, and lose draft capital. That’s not a great outcome either. It’s like the Brock Osweiler trade — but even worse for Philly than it was for the Houston Texans.
Even if the Eagles can stomach such losses to trade the quarterback, there’s yet another logistical problem for Wentz. It’s unclear which team would want him, whether because he’s 1) demanding a starting job, 2) arriving with a massive contract that guarantees his salary and/or 3) not been good, with the 34th best passer rating in the NFL this season. It’s not as clean as when the Cleveland Browns traded for Osweiler’s awful contract, getting a second- and sixth-round pick along with him, before cutting him. The acquiring team would be stuck with Wentz on their cap through 2022, though his cap hit, according to a detailed breakdown from Over The Cap, would be around $24.6 million — not an awful deal if he can get back to even being average.
So which teams 1) need a starting quarterback, 2) have cap space and 3) thinks he might someday be good?
Oh, boy. It’d be a stretch to find even one.
The New England Patriots, Indianapolis Colts, Washington Football Team, the New York Jets and the Jacksonville Jaguars have a need at quarterback and have at least $45 million in cap space (most NFL teams are in difficult cap positions in 2021, with the league likely to decrease its salary cap due to the pandemic.) The Jets and Jaguars are likely to draft quarterbacks at first- and second-overall in the 2021 draft. That leaves just the Patriots, Colts and Football Team.
So then it’s a question as to whether any of those teams think Wentz’s career is worth saving, especially now that his 2017 season is looking more like an anomaly than a true demonstration of his potential. Who’s to say what the decision-makers in those organizations think?
But with Wentz clearly intent upon causing problems for Philly, Washington shouldn’t give the Eagles a get-out-of-(salary-cap)-jail-free card. And we can probably count out smart general managers like New England’s Bill Belichick and Indianapolis’ Chris Ballard. Wentz’s only hope, then, would be that Colts coach Frank Reich, previously the Eagles offensive coordinator, makes a push for the quarterback to run it back to 2017.
It’s going to be a wild offseason for QBs, so we shouldn’t discount other possibilities like the Bears, 49ers or Browns (if Baker Mayfield is awful down the stretch.) Then there’s always the possibility that Tom Brady, Drew Brees and/or Ben Roethlisberger retire — leaving vacancies on teams that wouldn’t be in position to pick a top-flight QB prospect in the draft but would have some cap space freed up.
Today, everyone just needs to relax. This won’t get sorted anytime soon — maybe not even in 2021. There may be nowhere for Wentz to go.
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