Breaking the Philadelphia Eagles’ roster down by draft status

There’s an old belief that the best NFL teams are built through the draft.

Sure free agency is nice and is a valuable tool when it comes to finding complementary pieces but paying for big-time talent on the open market can sometimes be viewed as an indictment of poor scouting and asset management, as those positions could and probably should be addressed in the draft, instead of via the players another team didn’t want to keep.

Now granted, that isn’t a hard-and-fast rule; Howie Roseman signed players like Brandon Brooks and Malcolm Jenkins to free agent deals who ultimately proved to be much better than anyone could have predicted, and they were eventually compensated accordingly but those are the exceptions to the rule.

So, just for the sake of evaluation, why don’t we look through the Philadelphia Eagles‘ 2022 roster and see where each player was drafted, who they were drafted by, and how many found success despite not hearing their names called by Roger Goodell at the threshold separating the NCAA from the NFL.

The Philadelphia Eagles’ roster is surprisingly homegrown.

Of the 88 players currently on the Philadelphia Eagles’ roster, 34 were drafted by the team.

Considering it would be exceedingly tedious to go through every other roster on the NFL to count their draftees, add them together, and find a league-wide mean – just kidding, it’s 30.32 –  that feels like an above-average number.

Of those 34 players, eight were selected in the first round, including Lane Johnson, who is the highest-drafted player on the team as the fourth overall pick in the 2013 NFL Draft, five went in the second round, four went in the third, and 17 went on Day 3, with five in the fourth round, two in the fifth, eight in the sixth, and two in the seventh.

Fun fact: Do you know who the lowest-drafted player on the Eagles is? Well, of the homegrown players, it’s Patrick Johnson, who was drafted one position lower than Jordan Mailata in his draft back in 2021. Of the non-Eagles drafted players on the roster, the lowest-selected player is Kary Vincent Jr., who was the 237th player picked in the 2021 NFL Draft.

Outside of the homegrown players drafted in-house, the Eagles have 19 other players who were drafted by one team or another, including just one player – Haason Reddick – who was selected in the first round, three – Darius Slay, James Bradberry, and A.J. Brown – who went in the second round and 35 more who weren’t drafted at all, including starters like Anthony Harris, T.J. Edwards, and Arryn Siposs.

And what about the Eagles’ age? After being one of the oldest teams in the NFL a few years back, how top-loaded is their roster now? Well, of the 88 players on their current roster, only 24 have been in the league for four or more years.

Considering nine of those players are in their fourth season, including key contributors like Avonte Maddox, Josh Sweat, and Dallas Goedert, that’s pretty good indeed.

2022 is sort of a transitional year for the Philadelphia Eagles. It will likely mark the final runs of more than a few fans favorites – Jason Kelce, Brandon Graham, and/or Fletcher Cox, perhaps – and could shed some light on which players have legitimate sticking power at crucial positions of need, from quarterback, to cornerback, and running back too. But hey, with a slew of draft picks in the war chest moving forward, at least Howie Roseman will be able to build the roster back up the right way.