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The Philadelphia Eagles made a big acquisition on Wednesday afternoon by sending Marcus Johnson and a 2018 fifth-round pick to the Seattle Seahawks in exchange for Michael Bennett and a 2018 seventh-round pick.
Now that there’s been time to react to the big deal, it’s time to put it to a vote: how you would grade this trade? Here’s a look at some of the positives and negatives before we reveal our final grade.
POSITIVES
- Bennett is a very good pass rusher. He’s a three-time Pro Bowler (2015-2017) with 54 career sacks in 90 career starts.
- Bennett has the versatility the Eagles value in their defensive linemen. He can rush off the edge and from the interior defensive line as well.
- Bennett’s presence allows the Eagles to continue heavily rotate their d-linemen, which Jim Schwartz likes to do.
- Bennett is durable. He’s played 118 out of 128 possible regular season games over the last eight years. He’s only missed five games in the past six seasons.
- The Eagles essentially traded Bennett for Matt Tobin and Marcus Johnson. Tobin wasn’t guaranteed to be on the roster in 2017 and Johnson wasn’t guaranteed to be on the roster in 2018. Even if Bennett somehow doesn’t work out for the Eagles, all they gave up was two fringe players.
- The Eagles got Bennett for a low cost while the Giants traded a high fourth and a high sixth for an expensive and mediocre Alec Ogletree who struggled to cover Brent Celek last season.
- Adding Bennett helps the Eagles replace Vinny Curry, who is expected to be cut or traded at this point.
- While acquiring Bennett adds to the Eagles’ cap, his contract is not guaranteed beyond this season. The Eagles can cut him for a savings of $7 million as soon as next offseason with no dead money.
NEGATIVES
- The Eagles were already tight on cap space and now they’re taking on Bennett’s $5.65M cap number. It’s possible Philadelphia plans to shift some of his money around. And the Eagles will still make other moves to free up space, such as moving on from Curry. But trading/cutting Curry saves $5 million. By replacing him with Bennett, the Eagles added a net of $650,000 while they were already $9.6 million over the cap.
- Bennett turns 33 in November, so one must question how much good football he has left in him.
- Bennett is a strong personality. The Eagles had great locker room chemistry in 2017. We’ll if adding Bennett disrupts that.
- Bennett gets penalized a lot. In 2017, he was flagged 15 times. 10 of those were offside penalties. For perspective, the Eagles’ defense as a whole had 16 offside penalties combined last season.
- Marcus Johnson looked pretty good in training camp last offseason. It would’ve been nice to have him back to see if he could contribute more this year with Torrey Smith expected to be gone.
My grade for this trade is an A rating.
It’s hard for me to see how you could really hate this deal unless you just don’t like Bennett’s personally, which is your right, but I’m mostly grading this as a football move.
The Eagles’ defensive line generated the most pressure in the NFL last season. They’ve found a way to make their pass rush even better now. And they did it at a very low-risk cost.
Howie Roseman won executive of the year in 2017 for a reason. He’s off to a good start for a repeat performance.
How about you? Grade the trade by voting in the poll below (click here if you can’t see it).
Poll
Grade the Eagles’ trade for Michael Bennett
This poll is closed
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56%
A
-
34%
B
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5%
C
-
1%
D
-
2%
F