Howie Roseman addresses the Malcolm Jenkins trade rumors

Howie Roseman appeared on SportsRadio 94WIP on Wednesday afternoon and touched on a number of Eagles topics. One of the topics he was asked about was the report about Philadelphia offering Malcolm Jenkins in a trade for Brandin Cooks. Spoiler alert: Roseman did not firmly deny PFT’s original report.

Here’s a transcript.

IKE REESE: Lots of discussion Howie about the wide receiver position and what the Eagles would do. Lot of talk prior to Alshon [Jeffery] being signed here from us on the outside about Brandin Cooks availability down there in New Orleans. Pro Football Talk had the story out there today — I guess it was last weekend where they talked about the Eagles offered up Malcolm, a third round pick, and a fourth round pick. There’s been reports that it didn’t, that you guys didn’t. You’re here, wanna give you the opportunity to speak on it. First of all, was there any interest in Brandin Cooks, even though it didn’t go down, and then secondly, the report from Pro Football Talk, whether or not that’s accurate or not?

HOWIE ROSEMAN: Well anytime good players are available in this league, we’re going to be making phone calls if they fit us. That’s our job, that’s our responsibility to do. We’ve got to be aggressive for the right guys and see what it takes to get them.

And by the same token, people should be interested in Malcolm Jenkins. He is a heck of a player. And by the same token, we don’t want to give him up. Just because teams want guys or ask for guys, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to give them up.

And for us, we felt like the best combination for our football team was to go and address our receiver position the way we did in free agency. And keep our defensive backfield. Which, as we look at it, we’re continuing to try to address that position. We’re very happy about the way it worked out. At the same time, we understand that there are good players on our team that other teams would like to have.

CHRIS CARLIN: So it’s kind of a deal-breaker for you when the name came up. Is that fair to say?

ROSEMAN: Yeah, from our perspective, it didn’t make a lot of sense to do something there that would hurt the team when we could address it in a different way. At the end of the day, we felt like the best way for us to move forward was to address the position in free agency. Certainly we had a lot of conversations with a lot of teams. And I think we owe it our organization and our fans to try to see if there are opportunities to improve this team outside of the building, especially when good players are available. We did spend a lot of time talking to teams down there and at the end of the day it certainly wasn’t anything close to getting completed. And that’s why we went in a different direction that we did in free agency.

CARLIN: Do you feel like you have to talk to Malcolm because it became public?

ROSEMAN: Well, I think it’s always important to communicate with our players when stuff like this gets out. I don’t want to go into any conversations with any of our guys, because that will open the door, and I hope you guys can appreciate that. But certainly it’s important to talk to them and understand where they are as an Eagle. And when you talk about Malcolm Jenkins, the kind of player he is, the kind of leader he is on this football team, what’s he done in this community, he certainly deserves the respect when something like that comes out there to communicate with him.

Again, Roseman had the chance to firmly deny the Eagles tried to trade Jenkins, but he didn’t do that. The Eagles seemingly haven’t attempted to issue a strong denial ever since PFT’s report first emerged on Saturday.

It doesn’t seem great that Roseman would potentially risk alienating one of the team’s key leaders and best players. A denial would have been best here, even if it was a lie.

In the end, Jenkins is still here. The Eagles didn’t trade for Cooks. Philadelphia opted to keep their picks and not further weaken their secondary. Instead of making a deal, the Eagles addressed their holes at wide receiver by spending money on Jeffery and Torrey Smith in free agency.