What if the Eagles had drafted Kyle Hamilton when they had a chance?

Kyle Hamilton is one of the rare ones. Anybody can see it. That’s how it works with the best of the best. Doesn’t matter who you are, or how much you love football, or how much tape you’ve watched, or how many multi-platinum albums you’ve recorded before attending your first game. If you watched the AFC championship game, you saw that there was one dude in purple who was moving at a different speed from the other 10 guys on his team. You didn’t need a trained eye to know that he was better than everybody else. The great ones just pop.

The phenomenon is one of my favorite things about sports. Doesn’t matter if you are watching on a Sunday afternoon or on a Friday night. Doesn’t matter if you are watching with 600 people or 60,000 of them. Doesn’t even matter what sport you are watching. Pro football, college basketball, high school girls’ soccer, rec league floor hockey. It doesn’t take long to recognize when one of the participants is navigating his or her surroundings with a level of ease/impact that is an order of magnitude higher than the rest.

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That’s Hamilton: second-year safety, centerpiece of a Ravens defense that pitched a second-half shutout against Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid, the No. 14 pick in the 2022 draft, on the board with the Eagles on the clock, still on the board after.

“It’s like there are two or three of them out there,” Jim Nantz said after a second-quarter play when Hamilton forced a punt with a perfectly timed blitz from the slot on Mahomes’ blind side.

This was after Nantz and the rest of the CBS viewing audience had watched Hamilton blow up a screen pass at the line of scrimmage on the opposite side of the field on second down, which came after he broke up a first-down pass 50 yards down the field.

I come here not to praise Hamilton, nor to bury the Eagles for passing on him. I mostly want to illustrate a point I’ve tried to make in previous columns. Scheme, coaching, play-calling, all of it contributes to team defensive performance. But so does raw individual talent. It doesn’t matter how many times you ask a player to do the things that Hamilton does. He has to be able to do them.

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The talent a team has is the talent it chooses. There are trade-offs everywhere. I’m sure the Eagles would have loved to select both Jordan Davis and Kyle Hamilton with the 13th pick in 2022. But they had to pick one.

Anybody who thinks the Eagles’ error is obvious should think back to the last time they drafted a defensive lineman with the 13th pick instead of an All-Pro safety. Everyone loves Brandon Graham now, but he began his career as a legendary what-if. What if the Eagles had taken Earl Thomas, who went one pick later to the Seahawks in 2010?

Like Hamilton, Thomas quickly established himself as a generational safety. Graham wasn’t a bad player. He just wasn’t an impact player. Thomas? He made four straight All-Pro teams and anchored a Seahawks defense that won a Super Bowl in the 2013 season and should have won another the next year. The juxtaposition led many fans and media to label Graham an epic bust.

The Eagles are not shy about their philosophy of building in the trenches. It has served them well. Ten years before they drafted Davis at No. 13, two years after they selected Graham at No. 13, the Eagles picked a defensive tackle at No. 12. Take away Graham and Fletcher Cox, and you take away two Super Bowl appearances.

Yet there is something uniquely disruptive about a defender who has the ability and freedom to make plays anywhere on a football field. The positions where you find that combination are safety and linebacker. One of the big reasons the Eagles defense is in its current straits is that it does not have such a player. Meanwhile, Cox and Graham are still getting regular snaps.

It is a tricky calculus, far more complex than micro-level A/B substitutions. In order to end up with a player like Hamilton, you need to recognize the talent and also prioritize it. The Eagles can’t let the next one pass them by.