Here is my shot at an Eagles 2021 draft board – few points to clarify the spreadsheet layout:
- The left-to-right ordering of positions is my view on their positional priorities, grouped into Priority 1 (CB, WR, Edge, Center, and IDL), Priority 2 (LB, S, TE), and Priority 3 (RB, OT, QB, and ST)
- Each round has my view on Eagles targets – for slotting, I used a variety of sources primarily Grinding the Mocks and Dane Brugler’s 2021 “The Beast” draft guide on The Athletic.
- I marked each player with indicators if they had some confirmed meeting with the Eagles (virtual meeting, Pro Day, or Senior Bowl), if they were a Senior Bowl standout, and their Relative Athletic Score ranking. Reasoning is teams are more likely to target and draft players they met with. And, the Eagles have recently shown a preference towards highly athletic (high RAS) players. Some players they met with but had poor RAS scores (Dazz Newsome for example) and I still included them, but doubted they would be an actual pick.
- There are a lot of great players I didn’t list just because I didn’t see them as actual priorities or targets for the Eagles (which is why I refuse to have any QBs earlier than round 6).
Here is what my Eagles draft board looks like – for good or bad, right or wrong – going into the 2021 draft:
Post-draft update
Here is the draft board updated after the draft, with selected players taken as well as counts for each round showing how many of that position was taken this year vs. the average number of players drafted at that position in that round.
A few summary thoughts:
Positional priorities were aligned – The Eagles priorities aligned for the most part, with WR, center, and defensive line being where they spent their high picks this year.
Corner went later than expected – I (and everybody) thought corner would be taken much earlier than the 4th as I had it as their top priority (and I have 5 million posts and tweets pounding the table for a corner). And we will never know, but I think if Horn or Surtain were there when they picked, they would have drafted one of them. The 2nd and 3rd rounds also did not work out with corner being the most heavily drafted position through both the first three rounds and the entire draft. This reinforces my point that corners have to be taken high – for more on why and what the historical data shows on corners, read more in these two posts:
Defensive line and running back may have been draft inefficiencies – Both positions were drafted much lighter than typical years, with 2021 being viewed as not a great defensive tackle year. The Eagles got Milton Williams as only the fourth DT taken where on average, over seven DTs are taken by the 73rd pick. Even Tuipulotu was only the fourteenth DT taken way in the 6th round.
Where I was wrong – I wanted a center and was glad the Eagles took one, but really thought they would have stayed away from Landon’s injury history, especially with health being one of the three pillars of Howie’s draft strategy last year (“can they run, are they healthy, and do they love football”). And I missed totally on Zech McPhearson, Patrick Johnson, and Jacoby Stevens as they weren’t even on the board.
Here is the full Excel spreadsheet: