Gonna be honest with you – I didn’t even know that remnants of the Carson Wentz trade lingered until this tweet crossed my feed:

Let’s take it back to the beginning, to 2021 when Carson was dealt to the Colts.

The Eagles’ return was a 2021 third round pick and a 2022 conditional 1st round pick. You might recall the trigger for the 1st rounder was Carson playing 75% of the snaps that year, or playing 70% of the snaps with a playoff berth. The Colts went 9-8 and missed the postseason but Wentz logged 1,091 snaps and actually had the second-most playing time on the entire team.

To expand on Victor’s first bullet, Dallas took Micah Parsons at #12 overall and Chauncey Golston at #84. He’s been a rotational player for them and logged some special teams time, but isn’t a huge contributor.

But the 1st round pick was traded, which is why tracing this thing gets a little complicated. They packaged that Colts pick with their own to slide back to #18 in 2022 and grab a boatload of future picks. They didn’t use #18, but instead sent it to Tennessee as part of the A.J. Brown deal, then took the future 1st rounder they got from New Orleans and packaged their own 4th round pick to move up from #10 to #9 and get Jalen Carter. Finally, the 2024 second rounder was packaged to trade up for Cooper DeJean.

It’s technically false to say they turned Carson Wentz into those four players, since Howie Roseman took the 1st rounder he got in return and  split it into future assets, which were then packaged with the Eagles’ natural picks to complete those deals. Regardless, the fleecing of the Saints extracted extra value out of the original pick and made this entire thing possible. It’s one of the better deals Howie has ever done.

Of course, if you go back far enough, extending Wentz and giving him that contract ended up being a mistake. They did have to eat a gigantic dead cap hit as well, so part of this evaluation has to include the idea of correcting your own mistakes. How much credit do you get for that? In this case, Howie nailed it.