Eagles wide receiver Jordan Matthews was mentioned as a trade candidate before free agency opened, but since he remained on the roster even after the team signed Torrey Smith and Alshon Jeffery and drafted Mack Hollins and Shelton Gibson, those trade rumors all but disappeared. Recent developments, however, have led to renewed whispers that Matthews could be dealt.
For one, Matthews is dealing with knee tendonitis that kept him out of a good portion of spring practices, and though he is yet to miss a practice in training camp, Tim McManus of ESPN.com says that Matthews has struggled to “get right” since sustaining a bone bruise last August. Plus, the team has made no effort to engage in substantive extension talks, which, as McManus writes, is pretty telling given that executive vice president of football operations Howie Roseman has a history of re-upping homegrown players early if they have been identified as part of the team’s core. Of course, it’s difficult to properly evaluate what an extension for Matthews would look like anyway, as he has performed well to this point in his career but he is a fairly unexplosive slot receiver who profiles as a No. 3 wideout on a contending team.
Then there is the fact that Nelson Agholor, the former first-rounder who was all but written off a few months ago, excelled when filling in for Matthews during the spring, and he has carried that strong performance into training camp. Daniel Jeremiah of the NFL Network recently said, “[Agholor] has had a total rebirth. He’s in the slot. He’s going to live in the slot. He’s going to be their slot receiver. I’ll be shocked if he’s not. I don’t know what that means for [Matthews]. Agholor is a lot more dynamic.”
Marcus Johnson, who signed as a UDFA last year, has also been impressive, as has Hollins. And while it would be foolhardy to put a lot of faith in Agholor at this point, not to mention a former UDFA and mid-round draft choices who have yet to prove anything, Roseman would certainly be justified in dealing Matthews now and getting some sort of draft pick compensation in return instead of letting him walk away for nothing in 2018.
For what it’s worth, McManus says trading Matthews would be unnecessarily risky, though it looks like more of an option now then it has in some time.