It's not like we shouldn't have seen this coming.
He gave us about 5 years of playing every game and usually playing 100% of the snaps. Great. But then he gave us 4 straight seasons of missing between 20-30% of our season each year. And he's coming up on 30 years old, so obviously it was only going to get worse as he ages and the injuries accumulate more and more. It was just a matter of "well, is he gonna start missing 50% of each season 75%? What?"
Him only turning 30 this season doesn't *sound* old, but when you look at him missing time every season like clockwork for 4 straight years heading into this year? And when you consider he was only 20 years old when he debuted for us, it means he's been around a long time and there's less tread on his tires than on most guys his age. Most guys turning 30 weren't starting in the NFL before they could legally drink alcohol. He's got more wear and tear than most.
To add to this, I just have to say: it's weird how wildly uninterested we've been in drafting tackles in recent years given how blatantly obvious it was that Tyron wasn't gonna be able to be counted on for long.
I don't know why our team falls into the trap of ignoring players and positions as soon as we find a guy we like. We just rush to put things on cruise control and stop staying on top of the player and his position.
Us being caught unprepared for Tyron's injuries (despite multiple *years* of evidence warning us we needed to have a legit replacement ready) smacks of us being caught unprepared for the end of the Witten era despite all the evidence he was trending down in a big bad way.
Something I think about a lot in the salary cap era of sports where teams always need to restock their cupboards is the 2002 draft when the Eagles spent their first 3 picks (one first and two seconds) on defensive backs even though their secondary was a huge strength (honestly probably their strongest unit, and perhaps the best secondary in the entire league) with Troy Vincent and Bobby Taylor and Al Harris and Brian Dawkins. But they knew they couldn't afford to keep them all, and Vincent and Taylor might be getting too old for it to be wise to re-sign them even if they were inclined to. They knew they had to arm themselves for the near future when they could no longer rely on the names who had been there for years. They weren't reaching for immediate needs. Good DBs, it just so happened, fell to them and they made the picks knowing they'd have need for them before long. It's partly what enabled them to transition fairly smoothly as they turned over their defense early in the Reid era.
Compare that to our own CB-heavy draft a couple years prior to that. From the minute we signed Deion Sanders in the mid-'90s, we basically stopped paying attention to or caring about or prioritizing the cornerback position at all. We figured Deion plus whoever else would be fine. And it was. Until it wasn't anymore, and then it was time to move on from Deion. It snuck up on us (even though it shouldn't have and we were absolutely lost in the tall grass scrambling to replace him -- a fun preview of the next year when we'd do the same thing, scrambling to replace Aikman after putting the QB position on cruise control for a decade despite Troy's constant injuries that gave us lenty of warning he wasn't gonnalast forever). But suddenly we found ourselves needing to fix the conerback situation we'd let go to hell without noticing until now. It was an immediate need, not a future need. And we had to do it without even having a 1st rounder since we'd traded it away. We needed to immediately pick a literal Deion Sanders replacement (ha!) and guys to cover elite passing attacks like the Rams' (ha!) or the Colts' (ha!) or the Packers' (ha!) or the Vikings' (ha!). We suddenly needed to draft guys to cover Randy Moss (ha!)--bless our heart--armed with nothing but 2nd and 4th round picks to throw at the problem.It was an impossible hole we dug for ourselves.
The Eagles 2002 draft wasn't even a grandslam homerun or anything that emphatic. It's not like the new kids all went on to be All Pro's or anything. Just the kind of quiet competence that allowed them to continue to function and allowed them to be able to afford to re-sign important guys other than the 3 aging, expensive corners. But their quiet competence sure beat the clown-show our organization was.
I don't understand how we continue to put things on cruise control and allow ourselves to still be constantly blindsided by it whenever any of our good aging or injury-riddled players needs to have a good replacement.