*Official* Philadelphia E-A-G-L-E-S Thread (2007-2008)

[duracell]

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I loaded up the sports forum this morning before ESPN, and when I saw that this thread had ten new replies my first thought was "uh oh, something bad happened."

I love Trot and I'm going to miss him, but this isn't that shocking. The Eagles have several young guys they really like: Gaither, Dedrick Roper, Bradley and yes, even McCoy.

Gaither will almost certainly replace Trot in the starting line-up. One option is a straight swap, putting Gaither in the middle, which is what the Eagles website is saying. The second option is to move Spikes to the inside and play Gaither on the weak side, which is what ESPN is saying might happen. Spikes has taken the majority of his Eagles snaps on the weak side, but iirc he played in the middle in Buffalo.

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I agree with the sentiments on Trotter. I didn't think he deserved to start this year (I thought he should have backed up Gaither and played in short-yardage situations) but he is a leader on this team, so I'm a little surprised the cut him. He and Spikes were close, so I hope the cut doesn't affect Spikes in any way. I doubt it will, since Spikes is about as professional as they come.

Obviously the Eagles have a ton of cap space, so I doubt it was an issue of paying a back up $2 million a year. Rather, I think they wanted to get their young guys a lot of playing time. They obviously see a lot of talent there.

I like Gaither to start in the middle, and I know they had been touting him as the MIKE of the future this entire off-season. That said, it might make more sense for to the Eagles to start him at WILL and Spikes at MIKE for the next couple of years, so they could move Bradley into the MIKE position in a few years. Between Bradley and Gaither, I'm not sure who I'd like better as the future at MIKE, but of the two, only Gaither has any experience at WILL.

For the future, we'd have:

Gocong Bradley Gaither
Daniels Roper McCoy


Obviously that's a lot of young guys that need to pan out, but this has me much more excited at LB position than in the past.