Philadelphia Eagles: Trading Joe Flacco makes Gardner Minshew free

A backup quarterback is one of the hardest things to quantify in the NFL.

If you have a good one, it can be the difference between having a good season derailed by injuries and winning the Super Bowl, but once that guy puts enough good film on tape, some team will surely overvalue their performance and sign them away on a monster contract.

I mean come on, need I say anything more than Nick Foles?

Now granted, it can go the other way too. If the rest of a team isn’t particularly up to par, relying on a secondary signal caller will do little more than help a team’s draft positioning, which might not be the worst thing in the world all things considered.

It can also, in rare cases, mess with the confidence of a quarterback already on the roster – think Jimmy Garoppolo and Tom Brady – but that’s a story for another time.

Why, you may ask, is this particularly relevant to the Philadelphia Eagles on today, October 25th, 2021? Well, because Howie Roseman just executed a good old-fashioned NFL two-step that shipped Joe Flacco to the New York Jets for a conditional sixth-round pick that can become a fifth and replaced him with recently waived ex-Miami Dolphins QB Reid Sinnett.

The end net result? The Philadelphia Eagles got Gardner Minshew for free.

Howie Roseman made two good quarterback trades for the Philadelphia Eagles in 2021.

Gardner Minshew is 25-years-old.

He’s been in the NFL since 2019, has appeared in 23 games with 20 starts, and currently holds a 7-13 record for his tenure with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Do you like a gunslinger who chucks the ball up way down the field regardless of the coverage? How about a larger than life personality who can get a franchise fired up even if his passions don’t necessarily translate to wins?

Do you like game managers who run the offense as called and don’t take too many chances? Well, Minshew isn’t that guy,  but he certainly fits into the first two categories like a glove.

A disciple of Mike Leech’s air raid offense, Minshew knows how to run a vertical offense with limited personnel groupings designed to attack the entire field and is willing to rely on a run game depending on how many players are in the box.

And the best part? Minshew is a very efficient passer who has completed 62.9 percent of his 797 attempts through the first two years of his pro career.

Now granted, Minshew has his limitations too. He doesn’t have the eye-popping athleticism typically associated with 6-foot-tall quarterbacks, and his arm strength is average at best.

In the right scheme, say that of Bill Belichick, Minshew could surely excel, but then again, I sort of doubt he’d last too long in that role, considering his pension for throwing truly ugly interceptions.

But hey, with a year and a half left on his contract, I would imagine many a team would rather have Minshew on their roster than not, as more than a few fanbases are clamoring for his contract as we speak.

Joe Flacco, by contrast, is a 36-year-old former Super Bowl MVP who hasn’t started a full 16 games at quarterback since 2017 and is on his fourth team in as many seasons. He’s amassed a 6-15 record since his final season in Baltimore and will all but assuredly never recapture his former glory as he inches closer and closer to retirement.

By trading for Minshew, the Philadelphia Eagles added a viable developmental quarterback who may eventually see the field for the team. At worst, Nick Sirianni’s staff can watch how he progresses in his system and evaluate whether he’s worthy of a spot in the team’s future past 2022.

By trading for Flacco, the Jets got a… veteran stopgap quarterback who probably won’t record too many more wins for the 1-5 Jets and likely won’t help along rookie quarterback Zach Wilson all that much either, as he has a bit of a reputation for being a bad locker room guy.

Would the Jets be better off giving Flacco’s snaps to Mike White, a third-year quarterback out of Western Kentucky? Or how about practice squad quarterback Josh Johnson, who is on his 13th team since 2009 and most recently started games for Washington in 2018?

Probably so, but hey, I certainly wouldn’t mind a free sixth-round pick, even if it meant releasing long snapper Rick Lovato for a day.

The Philadelphia Eagles and New York Jets made their respective trade because, for one reason or another, they saw an opportunity to improve their quarterbacks rooms and took it. They were dissatisfied with their current depth and opted to proactively make a move to remedy that, even if the immediate results of the two deals couldn’t be any more different. The difference? Howie Roseman traded for a 25-year-old coming off of a deceptively decent season on a bad team, whereas his former right-hand man, Joe Douglas, exchanged a more valuable pick for a stopgap QB to keep a 1-5 team competitive.