The quarterback’s exit from the team he helped to a
Super Bowl was messy. But if he stays healthy with the Colts, Philly will get a bonus in the draft
Philadelphia Eagles fans had an especially wonderful day Sunday. Not only did Jalen Hurts, the Eagles’ new franchise quarterback, throw three touchdown passes in a lopsided victory over Atlanta, but Carson Wentz, the Eagles’ former franchise quarterback fewer than two years ago, played 100% of his new team’s offensive snaps – and lost.His new team is the Indianapolis Colts, who traded a third-round draft pick in 2021 and a conditional second-round pick in 2022 for Wentz, who the Eagles’ selected with the second overall pick in the 2016 draft, and was signed to a four-year, $128m contract extension in June 2019. The second-round pick becomes a first-round pick if Wentz plays 75% of the Colts’ snaps.Wentz took the Eagles to the playoffs in 2019, where he got hurt, again, and the Eagles lost. The bottom fell out so quickly and spectacularly for Wentz – who was sacked 50 times and replaced as a starter by Hurts late in an awful 4-11-1 2020 season – that no one would have blamed the Eagles for taking an unconditional second-round pick in 2021 and running away.Then it got interesting. Wentz got hurt early in the Colts’ training camp, then missed time when he was put on the team’s Covid-19 list because he is unvaccinated and had close contact with someone who tested positive. Further, Wentz was unapologetic about not being vaccinated, saying at a news conference that it “was a personal decision for me and my family.”That did not go over so well in his old town. The 75% snap threshold is critical, because the Eagles can at least scrounge a first-round pick out of what Mike Missanelli, a long-time Philadelphia sports-talk-show host, says is “the biggest organizational disaster in Philadelphia sports history.”The Eagles screwed up, Missanelli says, by spending a second-round pick last year on Hurts, the former
Alabama and Oklahoma quarterback who is nimble and creative – an alternative to Wentz, an injury-prone QB with a strong arm. Wentz all but pouted after he played poorly and was replaced by Hurts, then was traded away for practically nothing.
Related: Aaron Rodgers stank in the Packers’ capitulation. And the conspiracy theories started