The Eagles’ best option at QB may be to make some practical (Fitz)Magic with Jalen Hurts | Mike Sielski

The Eagles can swing for the fences and use another first-round pick on a QB, or they can play it safe with Jalen Hurts and a veteran like Ryan Fitzpatrick.

Miami Dolphins quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick is a free agent at age 38.Read moreEthan Miller / MCT

by Mike Sielski | Columnist

Published Feb. 27, 2021, 4:43 p.m. ET

On Thursday, the Eagles gave Nick Sirianni a second chance in a Zoom conference setting, this time limiting his interrogators to a party of one, and a kid-gloved one at that: team insider Dave Spadaro. Spadaro soft-tossed a succession of questions to Sirianni about his assistant coaches, and if you haven’t cued up the interview on the Eagles’ website, you’ll be pleased to know that every member of the staff believes in teaching the fundamentals and loves ball and can’t get enough of ball because, as Sirianni put it, “We’re ball coaches. That’s what we do.”

As he was for his infamous introductory Q&A with the media, Sirianni was alone in a conference room, looking into a camera. To break up the visual monotony of seeing him stare at some distant point in the room, the Eagles’ web team spliced clips and still photographs of Sirianni’s assistants into the video as he mentioned each one. When Spadaro asked Sirianni about Kevin Patullo, the team’s passing-game coordinator, the video showed a clip of Patullo from his two-year tenure as the New York Jets’ quarterbacks coach. The quarterback with Patullo in the clip was Ryan Fitzpatrick.

Whether Fitzpatrick’s appearance was totally coincidental or some subliminal messaging, only the Eagles can say. But it raised a valid question that Spadaro was never going to ask Sirianni and that everyone is already asking about the Eagles: Now that Carson Wentz is gone, what are they going to do at quarterback this coming season?

Anyone familiar with the Eagles’ history and team-building philosophy under Jeffrey Lurie can offer a pretty good guess at what their course of action might be. The Eagles have the No. 6 pick in this year’s draft; it will mark just the fifth time in the last 23 drafts that they will have had a pick that high or higher. Twice before in those situations, they’ve taken quarterbacks — Wentz in 2016 and Donovan McNabb in 1999 — and given the importance that Lurie and Howie Roseman place on the position, the Eagles’ drafting another quarterback this year should be surprising to absolutely no one. Lurie and Roseman are always hunting for a franchise QB, and they get antsy when they don’t have one, and there is no indication that they’ll abandon one of their core principles and strategies: that using a high draft pick on a quarterback, then signing that quarterback to an expensive and lengthy contract, is the surest way of keeping a team in Super Bowl contention.

Of course, the Eagles’ most recent test of that theory left them looking like Wile E. Coyote every time he opened a package from Acme. They drafted Wentz. They signed Wentz. He wanted to leave anyway, and when he got his way, he stuck them with a dead-cap charge of $33.8 million, the largest in NFL history. That the Eagles won a Super Bowl during Wentz’s five-year tenure is not evidence of the wisdom of their approach, either. They got that championship while Wentz was still on his rookie contract, while they were able to spend money and capital on veteran players to build an excellent team around him and Nick Foles. They got that championship before they spent major money and cap space on him, not because they did.

So why tempt fate by making the same mistake again? Unless the Eagles are ready to change their thinking about the quarterback position, unless they’re ready to acknowledge that there are effective and available quarterbacks aplenty nowadays — in the draft, in free agency, through trades — and only the rare, remarkable player should warrant so great a commitment, why not try a different tack?

The Eagles already have a highly drafted quarterback on their roster in Jalen Hurts, and after the Wentz fiasco, picking another one in the first round would only be an additional indictment of the decision to draft Hurts. Not only did drafting Jalen cause our former franchise centerpiece to break down the NovaCare Complex doors and run screaming into the wilderness, but we’ve decided Jalen’s not good enough to start for us anyway! Quarterback factory! The smarter path here, especially considering the ragged state of the roster, is 1) to give Hurts a genuine shot to win the job, and 2) to acquire a veteran quarterback who can challenge him for it. If Hurts isn’t cut out to be at least a solid NFL starter, then the Eagles will have learned that valuable information, and they can draft another quarterback then.

Which brings us back to Fitzpatrick. He is a free agent, and though he is 38 years old, he remains a productive passer and a respected figure throughout the league. He makes big plays and big mistakes, and those wild swings in his performance have kept him from settling in with any team and leading it to consistent success. But he would push Hurts, maybe even beat him out, and his best overall season — 2015, when he threw 31 touchdown passes and led the Jets to a 10-6 record — came with Patullo as his quarterbacks coach. It would be worth the Eagles’ pursuing him, or a player like him.

Is this plan ideal? No. But the Eagles’ ideal plan just unpacked his bags in Indianapolis and ordered the shrimp cocktail from St. Elmo’s. So Sirianni and his staff will have to handle a situation that’s pretty far from perfect. Such is life for a ball coach and his ball coaches. That’s what they’re supposed to do.