Moving Jason Peters Doesn't Make Sense

The planned move to RG was outlined the minute that the Eagles brought Jason Peters back into the fold

The plan was outlined the minute that the Eagles brought Jason Peters back into the fold.

The long-time left tackle on the Hall-of-Fame trajectory would move from his familiar home to right guard as the injury replacement for Pro Bowl stalwart Brandon Brooks.

It’s not a terrible decision but it is the wrong one.

The two biggest parts in the Eagles decision to move Peters involve Andre Dillard, namely the 2019 first-round pick's pedigree, along with the empirical evidence of Dillard flailing badly as a rookie when asked to move to right tackle to replace an injured Lane Johnson last season.

“We took a look at our roster obviously and felt that where Jason is and the type of player he is, obviously his leadership on the football team, that the transition would be relatively easy,” said coach Doug Pederson on a video conference call earlier this week. “I'm not going to say it's going to be easy, but relatively easy, for him being a veteran guy moving into that guard spot.”

The organization shouldn’t have gotten that deep into the decision-making process and focused on the NFL’s branding as a meritocracy.

This is about production and despite an oft-repeated narrative that Peters was slipping outside at left tackle, it certainly wasn’t at an alarming rate.

At 38 Peters isn’t what he once was during his prime and that’s part of the problem. Any fan base can get myopic and the Philadelphia faithful is comparing Peters to his prior level of play.

The better comp is always the context of the rest of the league around him and in this case the player replacing Peters.

So, let’s rewind back to that tortured 2019 season with the help of ProFootballFocus.com. PFF is hardly dogma when it comes to grading a player but it is well respected enough to have most of the NFL as clients to its services.

According to PFF, Peters was the sixth-best OT in the NFL behind only Ryan Ramczyk, Ronnie Stanley, Mitchell Schwartz, teammate Lane Johnson, and La’el Collins last season. Of that group, only Stanley plays left tackle, meaning Peters was the No. 2 LT in the entire NFL last season.

When it comes to pass blocking at LT Peters was graded behind only Stanley, the Baltimore Ravens' star widely-considered the best in the NFL right now, David Bakhtiari and Laremy Tunsil. When it comes to moving the pile the aging Peters was lagging behind only Taylor Lewan, Stanley, and the now-retired Joe Staley.

That’s why reporters get darts stared back at them when they ask Jeff Stoutland about Peters’ decline as a player. The context is lacking.

The only team in football who could definitively say they had a better left tackle than Peters last season was the Ravens.

Do you think you're going to be saying something similar at the end of the projected 2020 campaign with Dillard manning the position?

When you bring the research in-house, understand that Dillard was graded as the 58th best OT in the NFL, essentially a low-level starter as a rookie.

The NFL doesn’t exist in stasis, however, and when the decline does come for an aging player, it comes quickly. That’s where the Branch Rickey inspired cliche comes from: "It’s better to give up on a player a year early than a year late.”

When a normal offseason was still being projected that seemed to be the Eagles’ thought process and why the organization essentially said goodbye to Peters at the start of free agency.

Once COVID-19 pandemic hit, however, the plan to work diligently with Dillard had to turn into a virtual one and the talk of bringing Peters back started to heat up. It reached a boil when Brooks tore his Achilles’ in June and a different path opened to get Peters back.

"Quite frankly, we love where Andre is at. He's had a tremendous offseason,” said Pederson. “The things he did for us last season, the couple games that he played and started for us, he did well and it's just going to be a great opportunity for him moving forward." 

Stoutland doesn’t like shuffling deck chairs in general and inserting Peters at RG limits drastic change to a battle-tested veteran who won’t be broken mentally.

Still, you could have accomplished that by keeping Dillard on the left side where he is comfortable by sliding him inside to left guard. That keeps Peters at the position he remained a top-five player at last season and would have had the versatile Isaac Seumalo on the move to right guard, something he has already done and fought through.

The parts might have been moving more but the sum would have fit better.

John McMullen contributes Eagles coverage for SI.com's EagleMaven and is the NFL Insider for JAKIB Media. You can listen to John every Monday and Friday on SIRIUSXM’s Tony Bruno Show with Harry Mayes, and every Tuesday and Thursday with Eytan Shander on SBNation Radio. You can reach him at jmcmullen44@gmail.com or on Twitter @JFMcMullen

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