PHOENIX — There’s no such thing as rebuilding in the NFL. It is a buzzword, nothing more. It is a thing that gets said when there is nothing of substance to say. It is a preemptive excuse. Rebuilding is nothing more than a rebranded version of stinking. If a general manager is saying it, teams are lowering their own bar.
That is the lesson of Super Bowl LVII. Look at the rosters of the Eagles and the Chiefs. Listen to their philosophies. Most of all, consider the facts.
— Of the roughly 50,000 snaps logged by Eagles and Chiefs players during the 2022 regular season, roughly 14,000 came via players in their first year with the team. That’s more than a quarter of the playing time.
— Players with one or two years of service account for roughly 25,600 of those 50,000 snaps.
— Players who have been with the Chiefs and the Eagles for more than three seasons have combined to log just 23.4% of the teams’ snaps this year.
The conventional wisdom says that the Super Bowl is a place for master planners and developers. Reality is, it’s a place for architects and remodelers. Winning in today’s NFL is about making the most of the resources and space at one’s disposal. The evolution of roster-building is a lot like the evolution of IT infrastructure. Agility, responsiveness, adaptability — those are the keys.
At least, those have been the keys for the Eagles and the Chiefs. They are here at Super Bowl LVII because of the way in which they have managed to reinvent themselves in a short period of time.
For the Chiefs, that meant a complete overhaul of their offensive line after a Super Bowl loss in which the Buccaneers manhandled them up front. It meant trading away a superstar receiver in favor of complementary parts and salary-cap flexibility. It meant recognizing the roster slots that required significant capital investment and those that could be filled with low-cost, plug-and-play draft picks as their quarterback’s salary swelled.
For the Eagles, it meant parting ways with the coach and the quarterback around whom they’d structured themselves. It meant taking targeted swings on the trade market and waiting to find value in free agency. More than anything, it meant finding a coach with the right mentality for a young team in transition.
“You have to make things happen in this business, in this league,” said Chiefs general manager Brett Veach, who got his start with the Eagles before following Andy Reid to Kansas City and eventually ascending to general manager. “Things aren’t just going to fall in your lap. Good luck is a product of preparation and timing and the Eagles have done a good job of adjusting and adapting over the years and maybe having a thought process or path charted out and then have to veer. You have to be able to do that, whether that be in free agency signing players or trading players and having to kind of alter your route. You have to have a plan and stick to it but also take calculated swings.”
That calculated aggressiveness has been a hallmark of both the Eagles and Chiefs. After Kansas City failed to come to terms on a contract extension with Tyreek Hill, the Chiefs moved quickly to trade him to Miami in exchange for a boatload of draft picks. In his place, they signed a series of veterans who would serve as complementary parts in an offense built around Patrick Mahomes’ connection with tight end Travis Kelce.
In some ways, the Chiefs’ pivot with Hill was similar to the one the Eagles were forced to execute after Carson Wentz unraveled. Howie Roseman and owner Jeffrey Lurie deserve credit not just for their decision to unload Wentz, but to do it in a way that allowed them to quickly build a competitive team around Jalen Hurts.
“I think we stuck to our priorities,” Lurie said. “We’ve always been a believer in building through the draft and yet being aggressive in every other way we can find talent, sometimes thinking outside the box. I give Howie and his staff a lot of credit for thinking outside the box, being aggressive, which is the mentality of our organization, and at the same time making strategic decisions that really paid off. Some of them were really unpopular, and that’s part of it.”
The Chiefs and the Eagles are two different teams at two different junctures. For Roseman, there is plenty of hard work left to do on the road ahead. In James Bradberry, Javon Hargrave, and C.J. Gardner-Johnson, they have a trio of pending free agents who will enter the offseason looking for hefty contracts. They have a quarterback who could command a top-of-the-market contract extension as soon as this year. They have a center who talks openly about retirement, and a right tackle who is nearing a point where he could start doing the same.
But the Eagles of 2022 look less like the Eagles of 2017 and more like the Chiefs after their 2019 championship run. In Hurts and left tackle Jordan Mailata, they appear to have long-term solutions at two of the game’s hardest-to-fill positions, the latter of them signed to a team-friendly contract that will help offset the raise that Hurts will soon get. The teams who talk about rebuilding are mostly talking about the need to find a couple of players like that.
Maybe that mentality is what hurts those other teams. Get to the top of the draft, pick the best quarterback available, then do it again in two or three years. It’s worth noting that the Eagles and Chiefs were both coming off playoff seasons when they drafted their current quarterbacks. In 2017, nine players were selected before the Chiefs traded up to snag Mahomes. In 2020, the Eagles grabbed Hurts in the second round.
These were wildly different moves with different levels of risk, but both were a product of their organizations’ understanding of value. When you see it, you damn the torpedoes and move aggressively to seize it. Do that often enough, and the building never stops.
