Second in a two-part series | Part 1 | Addendum

It’s been five years since the Eagles made a bold move to get Carson Wentz, the player they thought would be their franchise quarterback, by trading five picks to the Cleveland Browns to move up six spots to No. 2 in the 2016 NFL draft.

It came on the heels of the Los Angeles Rams doing the same, trading a bounty of picks to the Tennessee Titans to move up to No. 1 and draft Jared Goff.

For a while, it looked like things were working out for the Rams and Eagles. Wentz was playing like an MVP candidate late in 2017 before a knee injury derailed his season, which ended with a Super Bowl victory directed by a backup quarterback. The Eagles also made the playoffs the next two years with Wentz. After Sean McVay was hired as Los Angeles’ head coach in Goff’s second season, the Rams made the playoffs three times in four years and reached the Super Bowl.

But it was an illusion. Going into next week’s draft, the top two picks in 2016 are on different teams: During the offseason, Goff was traded to Detroit, and Wentz was sent to Indianapolis after being benched the final four games of last season by since-fired head coach Doug Pederson.

A similar draft scenario is playing out this year. Most mock drafts have quarterbacks going with the top three picks, and many have a fourth going at No. 4, with a fifth being picked not long after that. One team, the San Francisco 49ers, made a big move up the draft board to get one of those signal-callers, going from 12th to third.

Whether any of those quarterbacks – Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence, Ohio State’s Justin Fields, Alabama’s Mac Jones, North Dakota State’s Trey Lance, and Brigham Young’s Zach Wilson – prove worthy of being picked that high will take time to tell. But looking back at NFL draft history can give us some clues about what might happen.

To do that, we gathered player performance data and paired it with every NFL draft since 1994 (when the draft shrunk to its current seven rounds), then compared each player against the others picked in the same slot.

We used approximate value (AV), a metric formulated by Pro Football Reference that assigns each player a value number and allows us to compare players across positions and seasons. By comparing players against others taken at the same position and in their own draft class, we formulated a metric called “draft score” to determine how each player performed given where they were chosen.

The draft scores allow us to see who is overperforming and underperforming given their draft position. For instance, David Bakhtiari is fifth on this list. That doesn’t mean he’s the fifth-best player selected since 1994, but when comparing his performance to his draft position, he’s the fifth-best draft pick since then. It should be no surprise that Tom Brady, picked 199th in 2000 and generally regarded as the best quarterback in NFL history, is the best draft pick in our data set.

The Eagles’ move up the draft board in 2016 came in two steps. The first was trading the 13th pick that year along with Kiko Alonso and Byron Maxwell to the Dolphins to get the No. 8 selection. Then came the big leap: They sent the eighth, 77th, and 100th picks in the 2016 draft, along with future first- and second-round picks, to the Browns in exchange for the second pick that year and a future fourth-rounder.

» READ MORE: Howie Roseman, Andy Weidl, and Nick Sirianni detail the Eagles’ approach to the draft

Our draft capital chart says the Eagles lost value to the Browns in the jump up, giving up 144.71 points of capital to get just 84.87 in return. And in the long run, the AV of the players ultimately selected with those picks made it an even more lopsided deal than that. (We don’t have a metric to measure draft capital of an active player, so we can’t fully evaluate returns when players are included in trades with picks, such as the Eagles’ first move up the board that year.)

In this year’s draft, the 49ers are in a rare position to add a highly touted quarterback prospect to a team already built for playoff contention. They’re just two seasons removed from a Super Bowl berth. Partly thanks to a down year marred by injuries and partly thanks to the treasure trove of picks they surrendered to move up, San Francisco has the luxury of adding a No. 3 pick to a team with elite talent such as tight end George Kittle and receiver Debo Samuel.

The Eagles were in a somewhat similar situation when they chose Wentz, adding him to an offense with multiple established starters along the offensive line. During Wentz’s rookie season, he was pressured on just 29.8% of his dropbacks, which ranked in the top 10 among starting quarterbacks that year.

» READ MORE: Did the Eagles get a good return for trading back in the first round? Here’s what the data say.

The majority of teams at the top of the draft don’t have the luxury of adding a rookie quarterback to an already-established team, for obvious reasons, and general managers can often bolster their job security by tying themselves to a young signal-caller.

“Most teams can’t build and then get a guy [high in the draft], because you’re losing, and then you’re out of a job,” NFL Network analyst Marc Ross said. “The way the Eagles kind of had it, I don’t think it was designed that way. It just kind of fell that way because they had some pieces. But then they were struggling, and it was like, ‘Oh, man.’ Howie looked at it and said, ‘We gotta go get somebody or we’re out of jobs here.’ ”

That’s probably why teams that trade up into the first round pay a hefty price in terms of draft capital. All teams have charts that assign values to draft picks that help them make trades, but moves like the ones for Wentz and Goff prove to be one-sided.

Of the 10 quarterbacks whose teams traded into the top half of the first round to draft them since 2011, only four signed a second contract with their original team. Among those four, only two of them – Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson – played even a single game under that new contract with the team that originally signed it. Wentz and Goff signed extensions but were traded away before playing under those deals. Josh Allen still has one year to play on his rookie deal, plus a fifth-year team option. The others – Sam Darnold, Josh Rosen, Mitchell Trubisky, Robert Griffin III, and Blaine Gabbert – never signed an extension with their draft teams.

“Teams are in that desperation mode from year to year to say, if they don’t have a franchise quarterback, that they have to get one,” Ross said.

Especially in the last two decades or so, the league has struggled to correctly identify and develop the best quarterback prospects. NFL Network analyst Ben Fennell has a theory as to why so many guys flame out.

“This is the Peyton Manning conundrum,” Fennell said. “Peyton Manning set back scouting quarterbacks about 10 to 15 years because everybody then wanted this cerebral field general, offensive coordinator in the huddle, offensive coordinator at the line of scrimmage, ‘I’m always going to get you into the right look and the right play and make the right read.’ Those are outliers. Don’t try to find another Peyton Manning because they don’t come around every 10 years. They probably don’t come around every 20 years.”

Fennell said the trend is starting to dissipate, though, with more coaching staffs willing to build offensive schemes around their young signal-callers. Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, who has become the centerpiece of an offense that capitalizes on the quarterback run game, is a prime example. So is Bills quarterback Josh Allen, who is at the helm of an offense that uses play-action to open up shots downfield, where Allen can use his elite arm strength.

» READ MORE: It’s a good safety class, but the Eagles probably aren’t looking for one

“I think the important thing with this new age of quarterbacks over the last five years is, at all costs, putting them in position to be successful,” Fennell said. “I think that’s what’s most important, and I think you need to instill more quarterback-friendly systems around these guys. That used to be such a taboo word, ‘quarterback-friendly.’ It used to be slanderous. It used be, ‘Well, if your quarterback was so good, it didn’t have to be quarterback-friendly.’ But why would you want it to be so difficult?”

Goff and Wentz were not awful picks. They rank seventh and eighth, respectively, in their draft class by total AV. But their teams expended a lot of draft capital to get them, while the Dallas Cowboys didn’t have to do anything to get Dak Prescott, the best player so far in the 2016 class, at pick No. 135. Prescott, in fact, is the third-best draft pick of the last 27 years by our draft score metric, in the first chart above.

But being selected with the first two picks in a draft sets lofty expectations. In the 2016 class, Wentz’s draft score of 68.34 places him 146th, while Goff’s 56.52 places him 173rd, out of 253 players taken that year.

It can be hard for high picks to measure up to expectations. Of the 432 top-16 picks, what is now the first half of the first round, since 1994, only 113, or 26.2%, have a draft score above 100. Wentz and Goff are around the middle of that list, sitting at 192nd and 237th, respectively.

In exchange for Wentz, the Eagles got back from the Colts the 84th pick in this year’s draft and a conditional second-rounder next year that could become a first-rounder. If we assume the conditional pick becomes a first-rounder, the Eagles received 55.05 points of draft capital from Indianapolis. On our chart, that’s approximately the value of the eighth pick, equal to where Wentz ranks by AV in the 2016 class through five seasons. But, of course, the Eagles invested a lot of capital to obtain Wentz in the first place.

» READ MORE: A timeline of Carson Wentz's career with the Eagles

The final ledger on the Wentz trades, to acquire him in 2016 and get rid of him in 2021, shows the Birds ultimately got back, at best, just 40.6% of their initial draft capital investment.

When you do the same for the Rams and Goff, the ledger is even more unbalanced. In exchange for all of that lost capital, Los Angeles got 33-year-old Matthew Stafford for two seasons.

The 269.98 draft capital difference in the two trades is essentially what the Rams ultimately gave up to get Stafford. It’s the equivalent of two No. 1 overall picks and a No. 4 over the span of two drafts, or the top three picks in a single draft with No. 61 thrown in to sweeten the deal.

That’s a lot.

Who will be the Birds’ first-round pick in the NFL draft? What moves will the team make? You better believe our Inquirer Eagles writers have something to say about it, so get in on the action at this subscriber-exclusive event on April 27.