Eagles Have NFL's Only GM With His Own Get Out Of Jail Free Card

Philadelphia's Howie Roseman is a GM with the ultimate job security

Aug 12, 2023; Baltimore, Maryland, USA; Philadelphia Eagles general manager Howie Roseman speaks / Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports

PHILADELPHIA – Three days of deep uncertainty and high intrigue are about to begin on Thursday. It’s called the NFL draft.

It’s always a thrill ride for Philadelphia Eagles general manager Howie Roseman:

Who will he take?

What sort of trade will he engineer?

Will he take the players the fans want, the right players in the right rounds?

You can be guaranteed of one thing, though, and that is Roseman will continue to have a job when the three-day draft wraps up. He could drat what would amount to a beer league softball team and he’ll be coming back next year, the year after that, and probably forever how long owner Jeffrey Lurie continues to captain the Eagles’ ship.

Maybe Roseman’ get-out-of-jail-free card will get retuned to the bottom of the deck when the day comes that Lurie’s son, Julian, takes over the controls. For now, though Roseman’s GM job is as safe as anyone else’s in the league.

It’s what allowed him to trade star pass rusher Haason Reddick for a conditional third-round pick that could become a second-round pick. In 2026.

What GM could make a trade for collateral that won’t arrive for two years? In a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately league, that’s about as rare as it gets.

Aug 12, 2023; Baltimore, Maryland, USA; Philadelphia Eagles general manager Howie Roseman speaks / Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports

Except Roseman doesn’t take his job security for granted, because, you know, once you start feeling comfortable in any walk of life, life usually finds a way to strike back. Hard.

“I would say this: My only goal is to win as much as I possibly can, and if I’m not good at that, I shouldn’t be sitting in this seat,” said Roseman as he prepares for yet another draft. “That’s the only thing I think about. I think, ‘How do I put this team in position?’

“But I also feel like it’s my job. I’m a caretaker in this franchise. I’m not going to be here forever. And I think it’s my job to make sure that I leave this franchise in a better place than when I got it. And to be honest, when I got it, it was in pretty good hands.”

Andy Reid and Joe Banner ran the show to start the decade with a young Howie Roseman learning at their hip.

Brandon Graham was Roseman’s first pick in his first draft he oversaw. First-round successes (Fletcher Cox in 2012 and Lane Johnson in 2013 to name two) and failures (Danny Watkins in 2011 and Marcus Smith in 2014) followed, but every GM has hits and misses.

“Everything that I’m trying to do is to make sure that the bottom doesn’t fall out; that we are not in position where we have to sustain a rebuilding time,” he said. “We are always trying to retool. And how do you do that? You get out in front of problems. That’s how I think about it.

"The way I think about things is, like, I’m not sitting here just wanting to compete in 2024. I want to do nothing other than win a world championship this year. That’s the number one priority. But I also want to put us in position to do it in 2025, 2026, and 2027. If I’m not sitting here, I haven’t done a good enough job.”

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