Desperate Eagles and GM Howie Roseman finally add a big-name linebacker in Shaq Leonard

These days we tend to view Howie Roseman through green-tinted glasses. We have our collective blind spot. And he has his. Funny thing is, his blind spot sits right in the middle of the field.

Roseman devalues linebackers. He considers them expendable, replaceable, interchangeable, unimportant. Needless to say, in a town that worshipped Chuck Bednarik, Bill Bergey, and Seth Joyner, this peccadillo diminishes Roseman’s popularity, even though he has taken the team to the Super Bowl twice in five years.

Which brings us to the Eagles’ blowout loss to the 49ers, and Shaq Leonard, and the Cowboys.

Stinging after the 49ers whupped ‘em good Sunday evening, the Eagles landed Leonard on Monday morning. Howie has a history of being a reactive GM — he signs players who burned the Eagles (D’Andre Swift) or copies good teams who crush the Birds — and the 49ers have the best linebacker tandem in football, Fred Warner and Dre Greenlaw.

The Eagles, meanwhile, employ zero linebackers worthy of starting on a top-flight NFL roster. This should be expected of a team that hasn’t drafted a middle-of-the-field linebacker higher than the third round since 2012. Other teams also shy away from Day 1 linebackers, and most have to be talked into second-rounders, but the best of those other teams seem to just be better at it than Howie & Co.

At any rate, you can hardly blame Howie for his Monday morning linebacker envy.

The Niners drafted Warner in the third round in 2018, which is a very Howie thing to do; then, in the summer of 2021, they signed him to a five-year, $95 million extension. Three thousand miles away, Howie nearly had an aneurysm. Warner has been worth every penny, and was the best player in Sunday’s 42-19 blowout win at Lincoln Financial Field, which is saying a lot, since all-purpose studs Deebo Samuel and Christian McCaffrey each gained more than 100 yards and Brock Purdy passed for more than 300.

The Niners took Greenlaw in the fifth round of the 2019 draft, 10 picks after the Eagles drafted defensive end Sharif Miller, who played in one NFL game. Greenlaw just played in his 67th.

Roseman, meanwhile, has wasted first- and second-round picks on the likes of Andre Dillard, JJ Arcega-Whiteside, and Jalen Reagor, while first-rate linebackers from those drafts litter the league. He drafted Davion Taylor in the third round of the 2020 draft — a kid who’d never played high school football and was out of the league in less than two seasons. At least he’s not a fireman.

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Roseman used a third-round pick on Nakobe Dean in 2022, but Dean couldn’t supplant T.J. Edwards, an undrafted special-teamer out of Wisconsin. Out of necessity, Edwards became an iron-man starter from 2020-22. Roseman deemed Edwards unworthy of the modest, cap-friendly, three-year, $19 million deal Edwards got from Chicago. Instead, he bet on inexperienced, undersized Dean, who battled an ankle injury all summer and was finally lost for the season with a foot injury in Game 5.

The Birds figured Edwards wasn’t worth it, even though he led the Eagles with 159 tackles last season and leads the Bears with 127 tackles through 12 games. Chicago’s a place that still values its linebackers. The Eagles, meanwhile, opted to sign a couple of unwanted veterans for a combined outlay of less than $3 million.

One of them was Nicholas Morrow, who’s been a placeholder all season and got burned by the Niners on Sunday like a freshman on spring break.

» READ MORE: Super-troll Deebo Samuel crushed the Eagles after talking trash for months. Was he right?

The team’s best ‘backer this season has been Zach Cunningham, whom the Texans waived last December and whom the Titans cut in February. The Eagles, desperate for depth, signed Cunningham after training camp began. Cunningham injured his hamstring against the Bills and missed Sunday’s game.

His replacement, Christian Elliss, is a third-year, undrafted special-teamer who made one big play against the Bills, one big play against the 49ers, and donned an invisibility cloak for the rest of those two games.

And the fact is, to my dismay (I loved the kid), Dean wasn’t particularly playing well when he got hurt.

» READ MORE: Eagles’ overmatched linebackers exploited by the 49ers for the Birds’ worst defensive showing since 2021

Leonard hasn’t played well this season, either. But at least he has a history.

Leonard was drafted in the second round by the Colts in 2018, which was Nick Sirianni’s first year in Indy as Frank Reich’s offensive coordinator. Leonard became an instant star. He earned Pro Bowl and All-Pro designations in three straight seasons, before two back surgeries and a concussion ruined his 2022. He hasn’t been the same player this season, and that’s why the Colts waived him two weeks ago.

Sirianni has spent the last fortnight recruiting Leonard to the Eagles like he was the character the more famous Shaq played in Blue Chips.

Leonard passed a physical during his visit to Philly last week. There’s a chance he will play Sunday night at Dallas.

Leonard’s frenetic play earned him the nickname “The Maniac,” which is perfect for Eagles fans and which mirrors Sirianni’s own exuberance. Sirianni could not have been more exuberant over the arrival of his newest player. He gave example after example of Leonard’s athleticism and ability to defend against the pass, beginning with Leonard’s 80-yard pick-six for the Colts at Tampa Bay in 2019.

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“He showed blitz, and then he backed up out of the blitz and they were running some sort of slant route over the middle, and he got his hands on the ball and made a catch like a receiver would, and then took it to the house for like [80]-some yards,” Sirianni said. “I remember him after that saying, ‘Coach, I played receiver, too,’ and showed me a post he ran I think at South Carolina State where he made a really nice play. I remember watching that and said, ‘Man, I probably could put him in there on a post.’ “

Leonard was just as impressive in practice.

“I have a vision of him at practice where we ran an RPO and he gave us a pull read on the RPO and then, boom, he sprinted back the other way and got his hand on the ball,” said Sirianni, who was as amazed as his quarterback. “I remember Philip Rivers was like, ‘He gave me a pull read,’ and I go, ‘I know. It was just an unbelievable play what he just did.’ "

Can Leonard make these plays like he used to? That’s not the question.

The question is: Can he make more plays than Morrow and Elliss? It would be hard not to.

The 49ers targeted the Eagles’ linebackers mercilessly Sunday with screens and crossing routes and delayed passes to their tight end. They were embarrassingly bad. Dallas will target them, too.

Leonard cannot be worse.