It was obvious to anybody paying attention at the end of last year that the Eagles were too old, too slow and too injury-prone to compete at a high level.
And all those things are related. Too old usually means too slow and too injury-prone.
The Eagles were the 12th-oldest team in the NFL last year according to Spotrac with an average age of 26.6. That might not seem very old, but the NFL average is 26.3, and the Texans were oldest at 27.2. Those figures are generally relatively low because most backups are younger players.
But 26.6 is relatively high and made this the oldest Eagles roster since the disastrous 2020 season.
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The Eagles had six players 30 or older start at least 10 games, 4th-most in the league, and older veterans like Kevin Byard, Zach Cunningham, Justin Evans, Shaq Leonard, Julio Jones, Nick Morrow, James Bradberry and Bradley Roby kind of became the identity of the team during the late-season collapse.
All are gone other than Bradberry, who’s on Injured Reserve. Cunningham, Evans, Leonard, Jones and Roby aren’t even in the league at the moment.
Howie Roseman has replaced all the aging, unproductive veterans with younger players, and as a result the Eagles now have the 4th-youngest roster in the NFL, according to Spotrac.
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Their average age is 25.8, and only the Packers (25.2), Buccaneers (25.6) and Rams (25.7) are younger.
So in one offseason they’ve gone from 12th-oldest to 4th-youngest without anything approaching a rebuilding season.
The Eagles showed the biggest age drop in the league from last year to this year, and considering there are 27 players on the 53 who were on last year’s opening-day roster – and they’re all one year older – that’s a huge drop.
When the Eagles lost to the Bucs in their wild-card game in January, they had 15 position players 28 or older who played in the game.
Right now, there are only five on the entire roster – Brandon Graham, Lane Johnson, Darius Slay, Oren Burks and Avonte Maddox.
Now, it’s important to remember that some of those older players were pretty good. Jason Kelce and Fletcher Cox, specifically. It’s not like the Eagles wanted them to retire. Kelce was still the best center in the NFL and Cox was a top-12 interior lineman.
But in the big picture, a younger roster is generally a healthier roster, a faster roster and as Roseman pointed out last week, a cheaper roster.
Because of all the big contract extensions the Eagles have doled out lately – Jordan Mailata, Landon Dickerson, Jalen Hurts, A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, etc. – the Eagles have to carry a larger number of young players on rookie contracts to balance out the salary cap.
That means they need their draft picks to be productive, and the current 53-man roster that will open the season in Brazil against the Packers Friday evening includes 22 of 30 players they’ve drafted since 2021. Three others are either on an injured list or the practice squad.
“(We’re) top heavy from a contract perspective,” Roseman said. “We have a lot of good players making well-deserved money (so) we have to have the bottom of our roster as much on rookie deals as possible.
“Nobody is on scholarship here. So it's well deserved that those guys have had the opportunity to make this team. I think it is important, as you build your roster to compete for championships that you have a growing young core that you can build along with the guys that you're paying.”
Spotrac has been tracking team age data since 2011, and this year’s roster is 2nd-youngest in those 14 years. In 2021, Nick Sirianni’s first year, they had the 2nd-youngest roster in the league with an average of 25.3, older than only the Lions at 25.0.
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