I think it's natural to examine the Eagles closely. They have been our main divisional rival for several years. The Commanders and Giants have been down for awhile.
I will say I think Howie GMs circles around Jerry.
They are interesting this year. A lot of young talent.
I do give Howie credit in that he addresses their needs. Last year their secondary was horrible.
Johnson-Gardner was a cap casualty and their corners fell off a cliff, and what they had on the bench was either not good, or not ready, or both.
He went out and addressed it in a big way. I was surprised Mitchell was there at 22 for them, and then DeJean in the 2nd.
That's a pretty nice haul for them, 2 of the highest rated Corners in the entire draft. They also resigned Johnson-Gardner. Now their CB and S rooms are quite deep.
They also addressed LB (also a huge need), both in FA and the draft, getting White and Trotter. Their DL looks a little less scary without Cox and Reddick, though they do still have a lot of talent and depth up front.
Offensively, it will be interesting to see how much losing Kelce hurts them. He was outstanding. They do seem to have more depth at WR (which they sorely needed). We will see which Hurts we get this year.
To me their biggest downfall is Sirianni. Besides the punchable face, I just don't see him being the guy for a young team. Peterson would be a much better coach for a team like this IMO. More a teacher than a motivator like Sirianni.
It's such an interesting contrast to me though.
The Eagles go "all in". Literally create max space from every contract so they can add players in FA.
Look at their salary roster. Almost every player, even vets like Slay and Bradberry (who likely are not long for the team), had their deals reworked to create space. There is a price to pay when those players are done. They are betting that it can be managed with the expanding cap.
We seem to be resetting our cap. I think the team feels that we felt we went "all in" last year. Signing most of our FAs and landing Cooks and Gilmore etc. It didn't work out, so the team seems to have desided to get off that wave, and reset, clean up the old contracts by letting them expire, replacing high priced FAs with picks (Guyton replaces Tyron, Beebe replaces Biadasz, Kneeland replaces Armstrong) etc.
We should emerge from this in a year or 2 very financially healthy. What we do with it remains to be seen.