Trading Haason Reddick is a risk for the Eagles. Bryce Huff is the key.

Evaluating the Eagles’ decision Friday to trade Haason Reddick to the New York Jets for a draft pick comes down to your perspective on team-building in the modern NFL. Did the Eagles misuse Reddick throughout the second half of last season? Yes. Did they — and by they, we mean interim defensive coordinator Matt Patricia first and foremost — waste one of the league’s best pass-rushers by having him drop into coverage too often? Yes. But they can’t unmake those mistakes now, and nothing was changing the fact that Reddick and the Eagles were at an impasse. He wanted a new contract that paid him more money, and they weren’t going to give him one.

The likelihood is that the Eagles made themselves worse next season for this trade. The pick they’re getting from the Jets will be in either the second or third round of the 2026 draft (depending on Reddick’s production this season), and it’s a high enough pick that there’s a good chance the Eagles can use it to help themselves. But in the short term, they gave up a sure thing for a what-might-be.

Reddick has had four consecutive seasons of 11 sacks or more. Put aside all the hullabaloo about Saquon Barkley; Bryce Huff, in terms of the contract he got and the importance of his position, was the Eagles’ biggest free-agent signing of the offseason. And Huff has had one season of double-digit sacks — last season, for the Jets, in a part-time role.

If you want to argue that the Eagles should have ponied up to pay Reddick, you’re free to make that case. But you’d better acknowledge that such a deal would be an albatross in 2025 and 2026, eating a lot of their salary-cap space. Reddick turns 30 in September, and the Eagles simply don’t believe in those kinds of signings for players of that age. Instead, they bet on Huff, who turns 25 in less than three weeks. They had better be right.

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