It’s here! Gather ’round the yuletide fireplace (or your TV/digital media station) as the 2018 NFL Draft kicks off in Dallas.
Thank you to those who submitted their MACH 10 ballots this year. If you’d like a scorecard of all the individual entries in the 12th annual MACH 10 Eagles draft contest, just drop me an email at [email protected] and I will reply with a Word document showing all the ballots.
Since it’s highly possible the Eagles will trade out of their overall #32 spot in the 1st Round, we may not get to see any hometown action on Thursday night. On the other hand, I will not be surprised if the Eagles stick with their scheduled last pick of opening night. Part of the drama for Eagles fans is waiting to see what happens at the end of the evening—another part is watching closely what the other teams in our shared NFC East division conjure up throughout the evening.
Since the gala event is being staged in Dallas this week, I’m even more jazzed on using this draft to stay focused on maintaining a winning edge for the upcoming season. I believe the extra emphasis will be for the Birds to bring in some fresh and enthusiastic competition for the rest of the roster.
That’s why I think the “positional need” aspect of predicting whom the Eagles will draft might be a tad overrated this year. To keep this team from slipping a little into overconfident complacency, I think you’d want to bring in kids who represent the “Best Players Available” still left on your board, regardless of position. That goes for the undrafted free agent rookies who will be signed this weekend, too. It’s just one way of telling your team not to take anything for granted in 2018.
Chris McPherson in a little-read article at PE.com addressed the issue of the need to face up to the tendency of Super Bowl winning teams to kind of take for granted that they will simply keep going from where they left off the previous season.
He got these revealing quotes from safety/LB/jack-of-all-trades Malcolm Jenkins (Jenkins won a Super Bowl as a rookie with the New Orleans Saints in 2009. The Saints returned to the postseason the following year but lost in the Wild Card round to the Seattle Seahawks in the infamous Beast Quake game where Marshawn Lynch’s 67-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter caused a celebration so loud that it registered on a local seismometer):
“For me, being through it once before, I kind of know some of the pitfalls but it’s one of those things that it’s a short offseason. We played for a month longer,” Jenkins said. “I just think it’s important over the next month or so that the veterans set the pace, just like any other year, you set the pace for what your offseason is going to be like and what mindset the team is going to start so it’s important as quickly as we can put last year behind us and focus on the here and now and what it’s going to take to win with the guys that we have and accomplish something with this team in particular.”
Jenkins candidly admitted that “success is a lot harder to deal with than failure.”
“I thrive off of people telling me I couldn’t do it, I’m not good enough, that (type of) motivation. You can easily start believing the hype when people here in April start telling you why you’re the favorite to repeat. You lose focus of the day-to-day grind,” he said. “That’s up to the veterans like myself, other guys on the team, the coaches to make sure we’re not looking or listening to anything else out there other than what’s going on today, how do we improve, and get better in the daily grind and enjoy that process throughout the year. Same thing as we did last year.”
Jenkins, who is a couple of weeks removed from thumb surgery, doesn’t think complacency will be an issue in this locker room.
“We’ve got a really good group of guys that are thinking bigger than themselves and would really want to create something special and know how to go about doing that,” he said.
Jenkins knows that bringing in a fresh crop of BPA-type rookie talent will keep everyone on their toes in Training Camp.
“I think what it’ll do is add more competition because we had a lot of [young] guys step up last year in key spots,” Jenkins said. “To me, it’s going to be that injection of some real competition especially when we get to Training Camp seeing who is going to be on the field and I think competition breeds excellence.”
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