By Lewis Gould
The last time the world heard from Howie Boy Roseman, the defrocked Eagles general manager was quoted on March 2 as saying:
“When you’re looking at trading up, at some point, your board drops off so dramatically in terms of how you evaluate that player,” Roseman said at an MIT conference. “But the history of trading up for one player, when you look at those trades, isn’t good for the team trading up and putting a lot of resources into it.
“Because the guys who are really good at the draft, if you’re hitting on 60 percent of your first-round picks, that’s a pretty good track record. And then it’s dropping as you go through the rounds. So really, the more chances you get, the more tickets to the lottery you get, the better you should be doing.”
“At the end of the day, it’s about the player you picked,” Roseman said. “You can go through each round of the draft on players on your team and see you have guys who are really good players from the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh round. . . . There’s always value. You can kind of convince yourself . . . ‘Who am I really going to get in the fifth or sixth round? I’m willing to give up that pick, because I really want this player in the second or third round.’ But it’s all about the evaluations and getting the right players into your building.”
Since then he has been mute as a button, which is appropriate because what he says about football decisions has all the significance of what a numbers cruncher and wannabe NFL GM should have:
No significance whatsoever!
So, it was left to Ed Marynowitz, Howie Boy’s replacement as the Eagles top chef, to delineate the difference, which he did yesterday:
“I think everybody does their job,” Marynowitz said. “I think our roles are clearly defined and I think it’s everybody’s responsibility to do their part, and everybody has worked well to do that.”
Roseman is expected to be in the Eagles’ draft room all three days of the draft, along with owner Jeffrey Lurie.
“We’re still in some of the planning phases of that,” Marynowitz said of who will have what position the night and days of the draft. “Right now we’ve been focused on the board, getting those guys set in the right spot. In terms of the administration of the room and the responsibilities that each person will have, that is still to be determined.”
So if the Eagles happen to be involved in a trade, let’s just say with Tennessee, at No. 2, who will be on the phone?
“It will be me and some other people,” Marynowitz said. “But, again, it’s a little bit to-be-determined on how we’re going to approach that.”
