Re-visiting the Carson Wentz trade: Was it worth it for the Eagles?

Turns out it’s very hard to overpay for a solid QB.

Look, I’m just as tired of hearing about Carson Wentz as you are, but with him back in the news — ESPN’s Chris Mortensen is reporting that his time in Philadelphia will almost certainly come to an end in the offseason — we have to take one more look back at the trade that originally brought him to the Eagles.

That trade, which was announced eight days before the 2016 draft, has been re-litigated a million times over the past five years, but now that we’ve likely seen the last of Wentz in an Eagles uniform — he’s a healthy scratch for the Week 17 game against Washington — we should probably take a look back at the trade that re-shaped the destiny of two franchises.

Analyzing the trade from the Browns’ perspective gets a bit complicated. The players Cleveland drafted with the picks received in the trade don’t make up a very impressive group, but some of those picks were flipped and eventually aided in the Browns’ acquisitions of Odell Beckham and Denzel Ward. That isn’t a bad haul considering the fact that they only dropped six spots in the draft order.

From the Eagles’ perspective, it’s a lot easier to analyze the trade. It all comes down to Wentz, and whether his five years of production was worth what the Eagles gave up. In order to figure that out, let’s use Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value stat and Chase Stuart’s draft value chart based on it.

Based on Stuart’s chart, the average second-overall pick is expected to add 30.2 AV over the first five years of his career. The Eagles also received a second-rounder that ended up as the 64th pick in the 2018 draft, which is worth 8.1 of expected AV. So that’s a total of 38.3 expected AV the Eagles received in the deal. The five picks they sent to Cleveland added up to 55.6 points of expected AV, so Philly was making a bet that Carson Wentz would be worth 17.3 AV (55.6 – 38.3 = 17.3) more than your average second-overall pick (30.2).

In other words, Wentz had to produce an AV of 47.5 to allow the Eagles to break even in the deal.

Well… going into this season Wentz had provided 45 AV. Pro Football Reference doesn’t release its AV results until after the season, but by comparing Wentz’s 2020 season to quarterbacks who performed at the same statistical level, we can assume that he’ll add about six more points of AV this year, bringing his total to about 50 over the first five seasons of his career.

From that perspective, the trade was a good one for the Eagles, even if things didn’t go as well as expected. And that’s putting it lightly. Not too long ago, Wentz was seen as a high-level starter. Then 2020 ended up being a worst-case-scenario for everyone involved and now we’re wondering if the Eagles will get anything in return for a quarterback who once viewed as a pillar of the franchise.

The lesson here: It’s really hard to overpay for a decent quarterback.