The Eagles expect everyone who was on the team last year to have a chip on their shoulders over the way the season ended. That prompted them to look for new players who already have that mindset, both in free agency and the draft.
“We had kind of a philosophy,” G.M. Howie Roseman told reporters after the draft concluded. “We wanted to have a ‘mentality’ offseason. We wanted to bring in people here who had a chip on their shoulder because we felt like we had a little bit of a chip on our shoulder. Not in a bad way. Just in a way like we felt like we wanted to do whatever we could to put ourselves in the best possible situation for this year because we had a bad taste in our mouth the last year, and we wanted to bring in as many people. I say ‘we’ because it starts with us that had that kind of same feeling. It started in free agency bringing in the free agents that we brought in, and we were looking for people in the draft who had that.”
That’s the goal. Guys who want to win. Guys who have extra motivation to prove people wrong.
“I know coach [Nick Sirianni] gets a hard time sometimes for playing one-on-one or playing rock, paper, scissors, but he is doing it to find out how competitive people are,” Roseman said. “He wants to see when he beats them, are they mad or are they just like, ‘Oh, I don’t really care.’ Because he is competitive. We’re looking for that kind of thing. We’re always looking for that, but it was more important to us more than ever this offseason.”
It makes sense. The new players didn’t experience the massive collapse and the local and national reaction to it. If they can bring in the same kind of mindset from a different place and refocus it, that’s the next best thing to being part of the 2023 Eagles.