The Philadelphia Eagles do right by Steven Nelson

Steven Nelson was the Philadelphia Eagles‘ best free agent signing of 2021.

Now granted, that’s not a particularly high bar to clear, as the team only signed a handful of veteran free agents during the period, but who out of that *cough* unique grouping would one consider better? Le’Raven Clark? Joe Flacco, Andrew Adams, and Eric Wilson didn’t even make it through the season with the team and Ryan Kerrigan might as well not have as well, considering he only recorded three tackles over 330 defensive snaps.

Outside of Anthony Harris, who did an okay job at free safety, and Jordan Howard, who technically was re-signed by the team after a late season run in 2020, Nelson was far and away the most impactful member of the Eagles’ free agent class, as he led the team in defensive snaps at 982 in 16 games of action.

982 snaps accounted for 87.32 percent of the Eagles’ defensive snaps, which is great stuff… unless there’s a clause in a player’s contract that dishes out a $375,000 bonus if they hit 90 percent of the team’s total defensive snaps.

Enter Howie Roseman, who made things right with the Philadelphia Eagles’ other outside cornerback before making him a healthy scratch for Week 18.

Steven Nelson should be very happy with the Philadelphia Eagles.

In the NFL, contracts – and the salary cap as a whole – are really more suggestions than hard rules. While there is a hard cap that teams can’t go over, a marked contrast to, say, basketball, teams have a number of arrows in their quiver to attack that condition from a variety of different ways, from performance bonuses to restructurings, and false years added to spread out money.

In that regard, Howie Roseman is like a mixture of Hawkeye and Kate Bishop, who, *spoiler alert* also goes by Hawkeye.

After working his Dr. Strange-esque magic – to mix my Marvel metaphors ever so slightly – to get the Birds’ cap compliant after straddling the team with the single-biggest dead cap hit in NFL history, Roseman somehow got the Eagles to $17.8 million in available cap space, which ranks second league-wide behind only the Jacksonville Jaguars.

So, with all of that money available to roll over into 2022 when the Birds will surely be players in free agency, why not invest $375,000 of it into a bonus for Steven Nelson, all the while allowing him to watch the Dallas Cowboys game from the sidelines as a healthy scratch while avoiding any potential on-field injuries? I mean, it’s not like Nelson wouldn’t have received the bonus anyway if he’d have been allowed to play, as he was on the field for an average of 61.37 snaps per game over the NFL’s first 17 weeks, so why risk an injury when it wasn’t necessary?

That, understandably, was the conscience between Roseman, Nick Sirianni, and Jonathan Gannon, and thus, they awarded the veteran cornerback with a contract bonus of equal value to his playing time bonus and got to effectively have his cake and eat it too.

Boy, Howie Roseman, resident good guy; who saw that babyface turn coming?

Will Steven Nelson be back with the Philadelphia Eagles for the 2022 NFL season? Probably not. While he has certainly played as well as any team could hope from a free agent signed in July, there are just too many quality options available over the next few months – I’m looking at you, Sauce Gardner – who would look better paired up with Darius Slay long-term. Still, it’s nice to see that Nelson got the money he deserved, as his play and dependability have certainly warranted it.