Philadelphia Eagles: Will Parks has played himself off the trade block

Will Parks (hopefully) won’t be leaving the Philadelphia Eagles anytime soon.

When the Philadelphia Eagles signed Will Parks to a one-year, $1.48 million deal, it felt like a match made in heaven.

Parks, a native of our fair city, was woefully underutilized during his final season in Denver and explicitly chose to sign with the Eagles over more lucrative options elsewhere as the perfect jumping-off point for the second stage of his career.

If you, at the time, though Parks the true steal of the 2020 free agent class, you wouldn’t have been alone.

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But then… nothing.

Now I know it’s a tad bit tired to blame a player for an injury that’s completely out of their control, but in this hyper-short-term, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately 2020 football season, Parks quickly fell into the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ category among even the hardest of core fans.

And when he came back, Parks’ play wasn’t exactly what anyone would call exemplary.

Blame it on some leftover rust or a lack of reps in Jim Schwartz‘s scheme, but Parks was a non-factor in his Week 6 debut and came an Evan Engram drop away from being the (bad) goat of the week in Week 7. Parks looked out of position, failed to live up to the weakside linebacking answer many – myself included – hoped he’d be, and was clearly the team’s third-best safety behind Rodney McLeod and Jalen Mills.

So naturally, when news broke that Parks could be had at the deadline for what would presumably be a very meager sum, it barely moved the needle on the Eagles fandom’s ‘Rage-O-Meter’. If anything, some outright welcomed a Parks exit, as it would free up more runway for K’Von Wallace to finally catch on as a sub-package defender – even if we all secretly knew those snaps would (probably) end up going to Marcus Epps anyway.

But then, it happened. Despite having a diminished workload of 28 defensive snaps (35 percent), Parks played really well in the Eagles’ Week 8 win over the Dallas Cowboys – amassing five tackles and two for a loss in what may go down as Ben DiNucci‘s first, last, and only NFL start. Filling the role of a third-safety/dime linebacker, Parks, in a weird twist of fate, actually made his biggest plays against the run, absolutely burying Tony Pollard in what may go down as the highlight play of the game.

While it’s hard to imagine Parks making plays like that every game, as he’s one-for-three on the season so far, why on earth would anyone let him walk right now, with the division in their hands, for something like a conditional sixth-round pick?

Smart answer: You don’t.

As improbably as it would have sounded when Parks watched helplessly as Engrem let that pass sail through his hands one week prior, the Eagles suddenly find themselves with a near-insurmountable lead in the NFC East of a game and a half, with three more games left to play against the division’s other teams. Even if those are the only three wins they record down the stretch – which feels like kind of a long shot considering how hot and cold the Browns and Cardinals have played as of late – that would still, as improbable as it may sound, put the team in a pretty good position to win the division outright at a putrid 6-9-1.

If Parks makes just a handful of plays that can contribute to just one more win, it’ll pay for his bargain-bin contract multiple times over.

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In the NFL, typically, the most talented team wins. If a team finds themselves in a position to win their division and enter the ‘anything can happen’ world of the playoffs, why on earth would they then trade away a solid contributor with occasional big play-ability for a not so valuable future pick? Again, they wouldn’t. For better or worse, Will Parks’ performance in Week 8 played a part in the Philadelphia Eagles shifting their intentions firmly into the win-now category, and in doing so, also removed his name from the trade block once and for all (in 2020).

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