The good news, if you’re Carson Wentz, is that you got your wish on Thursday. No more quarterback controversy imminent. There’s no tougher fanbase than maybe possibly if you looked at it a certain way, they never fully appreciated you. There is no longer a main office that would routinely praise you, sign you into a long-term agreement, and then, perhaps in their own mind, give up on you.
There is a Colts team ready to return to the playoffs and a head coach in Frank Reich, who was largely responsible for his best years as Eagle.
The bad news is that this is probably not the long track Wentz was hoping for. As our Albert Breer reported on Thursday, the Wentz trade terms they are a 2021 third-round pick and a 2022 second-round pick. The second-round pick becomes A first-round pick if the Colts play Wentz on 75% or more of their offensive plays this year, or if Wentz plays 70% or more of their plays and the Colts make the playoffs.
General manager Chris Ballard may not say so, but he has done a great job building a roster that is likely another left tackle away from seriously competing for the Super Bowl (with the right quarterback). Given the era of the nomadic quarterback movement looking for championships upon us, Ballard will sit idly by, wasting valuable resources longer than it takes to give Wentz a long-term chance, especially if he can go out and find another quarterback. field. Are you willing to join the Colts next year?
Put another way: If Wentz doesn’t walk out the door looking like the quarterback who led Philadelphia to the playoffs in 2017, and the Colts are fading out of the playoff contention for December, what’s stopping him from Indianapolis slow down the Wentz? experiment quickly for fear that a looming draft pick won’t turn into a much more valuable one?
Perhaps this is a pessimistic point of view. Perhaps some of us saw the Colts last year and wondered what a little functional mobility would look like in the pocket, and how all the trappings of Reich’s offensive system couldn’t be implemented due to Philip Rivers’ physical limitations. (That said, Rivers was 11th in “Points Earned” from Sports Info Solutions metric, while Wentz was the latter. Rivers played much better than he was credited with in 2020, but Wentz has a lot more athleticism and mobility at this point in his career.) Maybe some of us saw the play Wentz can still make with some regularity – the ballet, the spread, and smashing through defenders only to hit a catcher sliding to the sideline in the stomach from 15 yards away, and he thought it was preferable to a disposable shot.
And there is probably some reason for optimism. Reich understood Wentz better than Wentz could have understood himself on a professional level. His organization of the offense in 2017 was like a buffet of Wentz comforts, producing a potent confidence in the quarterback that brought the Eagles to a tear. When Reich left to coach the Colts and the franchise quarterback was given more responsibility, the resulting cracks in offensive ideology were never fixed.
Photo illustration by Bryce Wood
A return to this comfort, plus the ability to play eight games a year in a domed stadium with a healthy set of wide receivers, may end up handing the Colts the steal of the decade; a version of Wentz who had inspired so much initial confidence in Philadelphia (enough to produce a long-term contract that, when he is removed from the Philadelphia books, he will officially create the largest dead money crater in NFL history).
But you can also end up giving them a quarterback who needs the luxury of a watch that doesn’t always run out. That free fall began the moment Doug Pederson put Jalen Hurts in a soccer game and refused to take him out last winter. According to the conditions of this trade, that clock keeps ticking.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.
