Putting a Stop on Silly Season: Why Eagles Don't Need Bijan Robinson
PHILADELPHIA - Sure it’s swimming upstream, but it’s time to put an end to the silly season of speculation that has Bijan Robinson landing with the Philadelphia Eagles in the upcoming draft.
This is not the easiest day to try to do that after NBC’s Peter King put another log on the fire when it came to Robinson and the Eagles.
"I think if I were Howie Roseman, I’d draft Bijan Robinson 10th overall, break the Eagles’ mold of always fortifying the two lines, and say to the world: Okay, you all try to stop Jalen Hurts, A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, Dallas Goedert and Bijan Robinson—I know you can’t,” the always plugged-on King wrote in his Football Morning in America column Monday.
The groundswell of fantasy football or video-game sentiments will not budge Roseman, however.
That’s not an insult to the star Texas running back, who is the best prospect at the position since Saquon Barkley or perhaps Ezekiel Elliott if you prefer a different flavor.
Robinson is also a near-universal choice as one of the few real blue-chip players in the 2023 draft class, a group that isn’t exactly deep and has ranged from five to eight among the scouts who’ve talked with us.
The Eagles are like everyone else and will surely grade Robinson as one of those top prospects but he’s still not getting drafted by Philadelphia.
The obvious and only argument one should need is Roseman’s history and belief system. The reigning NFL Executive of the Year has never drafted a running back in the first round and his ability to win outside the margins escapes some lesser GMs.
With Roseman, it’s not only about getting a good player, it’s about getting him in the right spot so there is no value left on the table. In other words, if you draft a player at No. 10 and could have had him at 20 or even 15, that’s not a sound investment.
Outside of quarterback, no position is worth reaching for in Philadelphia even foundational building blocks like offensive and defensive linemen, never mind at devalued positions like running back.
To those who point to the Eagles’ recent misses in the draft like Jalen Reagor or Andre Dillard, you’re missing the point. Errors in evaluation happen to everyone in the NFL at times and the Eagles are certainly not immune to that. When it comes to valuation, however, Philadelphia is stubbornly consistent with its core beliefs.
At running back, the outlier in the modern generation was Christian McCaffrey in 2017 and the Eagles were set to take the now-San Francisco star if he fell to No. 14 but Carolina made sure he never got close, picking him off at No. 8 that year.
Why can’t Robinson be an outlier now?
In theory, he could but McCaffrey caught the Eagles’ eye with his generational receiving ability and was earmarked for a different coach (Doug Pederson) with an emerging quarterback (Carson Wentz), who could have used a best friend as an outlet receiver or security blanket.
The Eagles are now in a different phase with MVP runner-up in Hurts, a so-called plus-one in the running game who elevates backs and doesn’t need the traditional running game to make things easier like a play-action quarterback.
“We are who we are as an offense, explosively, scoring-wise, all those different things, because Jalen can do so many things, both running the football and passing the football,” coach Nick Sirianni said last season.
The counterintuitive notion in this debate is that Robinson would actually stunt the Eagles’ current explosive offense by being too good as a runner and forcing a first-time NFL play-caller in Brian Johnson to instruct Hurts to simply turn around and hand the football off to both take advantage of Robinson’s vaunted skill set and to better protect Hurts and add years to his shelf life.
Sirianni has consistently pushed back on limiting Hurts even after a sprained SC joint late in the 2022-23 regular season.
“In my opinion [Hurts has] played better than anybody in this league so far this year, and he's in that MVP race because of his dual-threat ability,” Sirianni said when asked if he try to protect Hurts en route to a finish line that ended up being a razor-close setback to Kansas City in Super Bowl LVII where he was the best player on the field in the losing effort.
Take that away and the unintended consequence of doing so would shelve the zone-read mechanics and run-pass options that make Hurts one of the biggest defensive headaches in football.
To those who say Robinson is an immediate upgrade over Miles Sanders, who was a 1,269-yard rusher last season or the unknown RB1 moving forward in those looks because he’s simply a more dynamic runner, understand the key to the success on those types of plays is the signal caller, not the running back, something that brings us back to the valuation aspect of this equation.
If Robinson generates say 1,400 or 1,500 yards, is that better than the status quo plus a top-10 offensive or defensive lineman?
“What the benefit of zone read is we have this great offensive line, but I was always taught you win games on the front side and you win big ones on the backside,” Sirianni said. “The backside wins, it was really as easy as this: Front side wins games, backside wins championships.”
Robinson, Sanders, Rashaad Penny, Kenny Gainwell, or a dozen others could win you games on the front side as long as Hurts is threatening that backside and the latter has already gotten the Eagles a conference championship with the window open for more.
“... That is a huge part of our success in the run game. A huge part,” Sirianni said of his quarterback threatening the backside. “Sometimes we're not even running zone reads, sometimes it's just the threat of Jalen to potentially pull. That's a strength of our offense that we have to continue to have if we want to be successful.”
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-John McMullen contributes Eagles coverage for SI.com's Eagles Today and is the NFL Insider for JAKIB Media. You can listen to John, alongside legendary sports-talk host Jody McDonald every morning from 8-10 on ‘Birds 365,” streaming live on YouTube. John is also the host of his own show "Football 24/7 and a daily contributor to ESPN South Jersey. You can reach him at jmcmullen44@gmail.com or on Twitter @JFMcMullen
