What happened to Power Five Howie Roseman? The GM flips the Eagles’ draft script with picks like Jalyx Hunt.

The Eagles’ tendency to select players from mostly elite programs in power college conferences in the early rounds of the NFL draft officially ended this year.

A day after choosing Toledo cornerback Quinyon Mitchell in the first round, they sandwiched the second-round selection of Iowa defensive back Cooper DeJean with the unexpected plucking of edge rusher Jalyx Hunt from Houston Christian in the third round on Friday night.

“They’re the best players,” Eagles general manager Howie Roseman said of Mitchell and Hunt. “The [Southeastern Conference] guys are still playing against great competition. I think these were kind of two extenuating circumstances because of the particular guys. Probably wouldn’t say it’s going to be a trend.”

Mitchell and Hunt gave the Eagles their first pair of small-school products taken in the first three rounds since 1996 when offensive lineman Jermane Mayberry and tight end Jason Dunn arrived via Texas A&M-Kingsville and Eastern Kentucky.

The college game and NFL evaluation have changed significantly in the decades since, but the Eagles of recent years have typically saved their second-level gambles for the latter rounds of the draft.

That isn’t to say that Mitchell or even Hunt was a reach. Many analysts had the former going in the first round — some earlier than when the Eagles selected at No. 22 — and the latter wasn’t some unknown whom only Roseman and his scouts had on their radar.

Roseman joked that after trading back twice in the third round — and sacrificing both of their second-rounders to move up for DeJean — he kept looking up the TV screen in the draft room to see former Eagles scout and current NFL Network draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah with Hunt as the best available on his board.

“You think you get a guy from Houston Christian and nobody is going to know,” Roseman said. “Goes to the point. Everybody knew him. He was at Senior Bowl.”

» READ MORE: From a three-stoplight Florida town to the NFL draft’s first round, Quinyon Mitchell is the Eagles’ big get

The point, as Roseman noted in the opening of his news conference following the third round, was that there are few secrets in NFL scouting anymore.

“I remember being in Alabama one year with [former Ravens GM] Ozzie Newsome and he said, ‘Everyone knows the guys. There is nobody you’re drafting today, tomorrow, that somebody is going to look up and go, ‘Who is that guy?’” Roseman said. “Everyone has this information. It’s just really your order of preference.

“So when you get to a day like today and certain guys stick out, you want to go get those guys.”

Roseman was referencing, in particular, the Eagles’ move up to the No. 40 overall pick for DeJean, a prospect he said had a first-round grade. Iowa, as Roseman noted, “is pretty big-time football,” although it was the native of the state’s lone major conference offer coming out of high school.

But the early drafting of Hunt and Mitchell — and DeJean to a lesser degree — does stand in contrast to how the Eagles conducted business in the previous three drafts.

From 2021-23, the GM selected prospects from Alabama (DeVonta Smith), Alabama (Landon Dickerson), Louisiana Tech (Milton Williams), Georgia (Jordan Davis), Nebraska (Cam Jurgens), Georgia (Jalen Carter), Georgia (Nolan Smith), Alabama (Tyler Steen) and Illinois (Sydney Brown) in the first three rounds.

It seemed as if Roseman was taking the guesswork out of the evaluation process by choosing players, not only from Power Five conferences, but from perennial national championship contenders like Alabama and Georgia. And many fans liked it partly because of the familiarity.

It made sense, of course, to draft players who had competed against the best on a weekly basis and had been bred to someday play in the NFL. Smith and Dickerson delivered immediately and just recently signed long-term contract extensions.

But the jury is still out on the rest of the group, even if Jurgens and Carter have shown promise.

Which is probably why Roseman was unlikely to continue the trend of drafting from a select few programs. Yes, most of the elite talent comes from the SEC, Big Ten, Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC — although realignment in 2024 shuffles some of the conferences — but a few studs can slip through those razor-thin cracks.

It’s increasingly rare with the college transfer portal, which could explain why it’s harder to find either many small-school prospects taken in the first three rounds or ones who have prospered in the NFL over the last three years.

But Mitchell opted to stay at Toledo when he had offers to transfer, and Hunt had positional and college changes that mostly kept him under the radar until his senior season. He started his career as a safety at Cornell. But COVID-19 canceled the entire Ivy League season in 2020, and he eventually moved to defensive end at Houston Christian.

The 6-foot-4, 252-pound Hunt put up impressive numbers in the Southland Conference, notching 13½ sacks, 20½ tackles for loss, and 133 total tackles. It was enough to earn him invites to the Senior Bowl and NFL Scouting Combine, where he looked the NFL part.

» READ MORE: Eagles are getting a diamond in the rough with Houston Christian edge rusher Jalyx Hunt

But Roseman slow-played expectations.

“This is a perfect developmental guy for us because of the tools in his body and his character and work ethic, and we think we can really find something with him,” the GM said. “That’s on us. That’s on how he’s going to work.

“You can say, ‘Well, that’s the third round and you’re a good team, why are you doing that?’ Because these guys are hard to find.”

Roseman has made similar comments about projectable draft picks before, only for some of them never to pan out. Davion Taylor, a linebacker selected in the third round of the 2020 draft, was one of the latest examples. There were seemingly more of those types in Roseman’s early years as GM.

But more recent high-profile misses — Jalen Reagor and Andre Dillard, notably — have come with prospects who played at Power Five programs and were projected based more on their skills than their college film.

The Eagles’ 2021 draft — one of Roseman’s best — was an autocorrection of those mistakes. And 2022 and 2023, to some degree, were a continuation of that — perhaps to a fault.

Was 2024 a response to that? Or is the sample too small? The Eagles still have seven selections remaining in the final three rounds on Saturday to alter the narrative.

“We like where the draft is tomorrow,” Roseman said. “We think we’re going to get an opportunity to add some good players tomorrow in the fourth and fifth rounds.”

It’s unlikely Roseman uses all of his picks, but of the ones he uses, most are likely to come from schools with familiar names. That doesn’t mean they’ll make good pros.