You have a few more days before April 26 to drop your MACH 10 ballot entry into the Comments section below. Ten (10) names of guys you think might be drafted by the Eagles later this week….
Maybe someday the brains behind the MACH 10 will provide for adding a UDFA category— undrafted free agent rookies who are typically signed by the team within 48 hours of the end of the Draft.
Corey Clement was one of those UDFA guys—where would we have been in 2017 and in the Super Bowl without his contributions? Heck, you can go all the way back to Jason Peters’ rookie year, when he was an undrafted rookie signed by the Buffalo Bills.
This year the UDFA signings may be just as important as the official draft picks of the Eagles. That’s because unless Howie Roseman manages to wheel and deal for some extra picks, the Eagles are a sitting duck in the Draft with a mere 6 selections, with zero picks scheduled for the 2nd and 3rd rounds.
Jimmy Kempski did a column recently with an emphasis on the importance of the UDFA activity this season. Here are a few tidbits from that article:
“In 2018, the importance of finding another diamond in the rough like Clement will be heightened, for two main reasons:
“They presently have just six picks in the 2018 NFL Draft.
They have a lot of money tied up in future years, plus a mega-contract looming on the horizon for Carson Wentz, so the more good, cheap players they can land, the better they’ll be able to cope with losing big name players they can no longer afford.
“[Eagles] Personnel head Joe Douglas thinks that landing priority undrafted free agents will be more challenging for the Eagles than it has been in the past.
“You would think that because we’re coming off a Super Bowl and we don’t have a second- or third-round pick that it would be a lot easier (to land free agents) after the draft, but in my experience, coming off a Super Bowl, it’s sometimes harder to get guys to commit to your roster because agents and players have a perceived notion that it’s going to be that much tougher to make the team,” Douglas explained.
“That’s going to be a challenge for us, and we know it, and we’re going to attack it. I think our guys are going to do a great job of recruiting these guys that slip through the cracks like they did last year, but it is going to be a challenge.”
I guess in a perfect MACH 10 world the UDFA’s could be somehow included in the overall contest. After all, even the guys who are officially drafted have no guarantee of making the final roster.
I can see how including UDFA’s in the MACH 10 mix could become a logistic nightmare, however. For example, what would happen if a UDFA were signed as late as May 15 or June 30? The MACH 10 contest winner could not be announced until close to the opening of Training Camp in July.
So no problem here going forward with the existing MACH 10 rules—just dreaming about a perfect statistical world in which UDFA’s counted at least as much as a 5th, 6th or 7th Round draft pick.
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