Howie Roseman breaks down difficult decision behind trading CJ Gardner-Johnson
The Philadelphia Eagles traded veteran safety C.J. Gardern-Johnson to the Houston Texans for guard Kenyon Green earlier this month. The Eagles also swapped draft picks; Philly received a 2026 fifth-round pick, while Houston received a 2026 sixth-rounder. The move shocked many considering the Eagles are fairly thin at the safety. However, during the NFL annual meetings in […]
The Philadelphia Eagles traded veteran safety C.J. Gardern-Johnson to the Houston Texans for guard Kenyon Green earlier this month. The Eagles also swapped draft picks; Philly received a 2026 fifth-round pick, while Houston received a 2026 sixth-rounder.
The move shocked many considering the Eagles are fairly thin at the safety.
However, during the NFL annual meetings in Florida, Eagles general manager Howie Roseman did his best to make sense of the trade.
“Every dollar that you spend is a dollar less that you can spend on some of these younger players that maybe you want to retain,” Roseman said. “Getting out in front of it was important to us. And again, hard decisions. Not asking anyone to agree with them, but that's part of our job.”
Roseman admitted it was far from an easy decision and emphasized that locking down the young guys is better for the Eagles in the long run.
"I think if you're just taking the C.J. move in a vacuum, it's kind of not giving the whole perspective of where we're at. And I think Chauncey did a great job for us, and both the years that he was with us — obviously, making the Super Bowl twice in two years with him as our starting safety.
"Really, when you look at our team and you look at kind of the amount of highly paid players who earned their contracts — we got eight guys who are making $15 million or more — we have from the 2022 to 2024 drafts, we have eight starters who are on the Super Bowl team, none of those guys have long-term contracts. In those drafts, probably have five or six players that will be competing for starting jobs.
"So you have a lot of players coming through that aren't under long-term contracts, plus a lot of guys who are on long-term contracts, and we never want to be in a situation where we have one year where we're getting rid of 20 guys. And we've been very fortunate to be aggressive in keeping our guys and signing guys in free agency, and it's also got to align with with the draft and having young players. Certainly that that's the important thing to do, is draft well and then keep your players. And so we got to make sure that going forward, we have an opportunity to do that, as well. A lot of those players that we're talking about are good young players that we're excited about. And so we had to make some tough decisions here."
Overall, the move didn't save the Eagles a ton of cap space, but it will help free up cap space for next off-season when it is time to pay big bucks to the younger stars, such as Jalen Carter and Nolan Smith
And when it comes to the young safeties stepping up this season, Roseman is referring to Sydney Brown and Reed Blankenship, who will also be playing with hopes of an extension on the horizon.
