Is it time for the Philadelphia Eagles to embrace the tank?

The Philadelphia Eagles are spiraling towards a top ten pick.

Following back-to-back-to-back postseason trips, the Philadelphia Eagles are now beginning to start their inevitable downward spiral. The team has just three wins through ten games of football, and they rank towards the bottom of the NFL in a handful of statistical categories, specifically on the offensive side of the ball.

While they miraculously still sit in first place in the NFC East, the team is undoubtedly really bad. I could make an argument for literally every position on the roster being a “position of need” heading into the offseason, and their looming cap issues only make it all even worse. Howie Roseman won’t be able to use free agency as a way to plug and fill holes, he’ll instead be reliant on the draft, a process that him and his crew have really struggled with in recent years.

With all that in mind, a potential argument can be made for the Philadelphia Eagles prioritizing their draft position moving forward, despite their current playoff position. Landing a top ten pick wouldn’t solve all of the Eagles issues, but it could be a step in the right direction for a team that has seriously lacked exciting young players over the last couple of seasons.

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The Eagles next couple of games come against the Seahawks, Packers, Saints, and Cardinals. There’s an incredibly realistic scenario where Philly loses all four of these ballgames, and drop down to 3-10-1 heading into the final two weeks of the season. Two wins in Week 16 and 17 against Dallas and Washington could genuinely see the Eagles still win the division, but that’s beyond the point. A five win season with the second most expensive roster in the league is really bad news, and it’s a performance that screams of a team needing a full-on reboot.

When it comes to “tanking” in the NFL, I don’t personally believe it really works all that well. NFL organizations are massive, and have a ton of moving parts all over the roster, coaching staff, front office, and training staff. The idea that one top ten prospect is enough to vault a team back to the top of the league is pretty silly, and it almost never works. Just take a look at teams like New York and Washington, who routinely pick towards the top of the draft and yet seemingly never improve.

With that said, landing a high value draft pick could do wonders for the Eagles in terms of loading back up on draft capital. Trading back out of a top ten position could land Philly with 2-3 future starters, which is obviously desperately needed considering the state of their aging roster.

Doug Pederson and the Eagles aren’t going to be out there “throwing” games for draft position, but benching some of the veterans for the last couple of weeks would likely be enough to ensure the Eagles finish the season with no more than five wins. Jason Peters, Zach Ertz, and others probably don’t need to be on the field moving forward, and their absence would only aid the team’s potential desire to drop games.

Less than three years removed from a Super Bowl win, it’s genuinely crazy that the Eagles are already talked about in the same sentence as “tanking”, but yet here we are. With a brutal schedule up ahead, embracing a low-win 2020 campaign might just be the best strategy at the moment.