EAGLEMANIACAL.com

(2a.m., coffee bathes the lower halves of my pupils, fingers flying, ‘No Church In the Wild’ on repeat, on repeat, on repeat.)

(Whispering) Run with me.

TRADING away a 5^th round pick and WR Marcus Johnson, to get DE Michael Bennett and a 7^th round pick, seems like a steal on the surface. A fiery, veteran pass rusher, who’s used to winning? That sounds like a guy any defense would be happy to have in their starting line-up. Clearly we crushed the fuck out of this trade.

Whoa now. Pump the brakes. While there’s no knocking the addition of Bennett, his being added to the roster signals two things.

The first thing is that, the Eagles are about to release DE Vinny Curry, in move that’s designed to save the team $5M of the $11M he’s scheduled to be paid in 2018. (Initially I’d put my feelings about that in this article, but it hijacked the article’s tone. So, I decided to relocate those paragraphs. They’re still part of the original draft, they just weren’t added to what you can see here.)

The second thing it signals is, Derek Barnett will now become our starting RDE. No surprise there. That was the plan from the moment he was drafted on the steps to the Art Museum’s East Door last Spring. However, Curry’s contract still had guaranteed money on it, and that didn’t facilitate Curry being a back-up in 2017. So Barnett sat lat year.

That was last year.

It remains to be seen how this will affect our run defense however, since Curry was our best DE against the run in 2017. Curry did an excellent job of setting the edge of the defense last season, and keeping runs from successfully bouncing wide, on his side. It remains to be seen if Barnett can hold it down the same way.

For his part, Bennett is here to be the 2018 version of Chris Long. A veteran player who probably isn’t as good as he used to be over 16 full games, but might be awesome over 16 half games. There can be no doubt that he will put heat on QB’s, and probably make our four man pass rush even more effective than it was in 2017.

While Bennett can be moved around pretty much anywhere on the Defensive Line, he’s likely to mainly line up at RDE. I love that. A QB who sees Bennett lined up on his blind-side, is already thinking of quickly dumping the ball. Even before the ball is snapped. That’s already a rushed pass.

Basically Bennett means we can intimidate opposing passers, just because of where we line him up. Not bad Howie Roseman. Not bad at all.

Oh yeah, just because I put this out, doesn’t mean I skipped out on today’s THE 12 article.  You can find that right HERE