Philadelphia is the best drafting organization in the NFL. Across the eleven complete classes from 2012 through 2022, Howie Roseman turned 67.5 percent of the Eagles’ 80 draft picks into 500-snap NFL contributors, the highest rate of any front office in the league. The Eagles also rank third in the league at retaining the players they drafted: 8 of the 25 cohort hits from 2017 through 2021 are still on the 2025 roster, a 32 percent rate that puts them behind only the Bills and the Chiefs.
The version of this piece that was published in late April 2026 framed the Eagles as a paradox. Drafted elite, retained middle. That framing was an artifact of the threshold we used at the time. A 100-snap line for “hit” is wide enough that almost every drafter looks like a successful one, and at that threshold the Eagles’ middle-of-the-pack 21 percent cohort retention looked dramatically out of step with their 88.75 percent hit rate. Raise the line to 500 snaps in any single regular season, the threshold where a player has been a real rotational contributor for at least one year, and the picture sharpens. The league hit rate drops from 85 percent to 57. The Eagles emerge as the league’s leader on the metric that matters and a top-three retainer of the players the metric counts. The full methodology change is documented at /methodology.
The reframe is worth naming directly because Roseman’s organization has spent fifteen years getting credit for hitting in the draft and grief for the cap-management gymnastics required to keep the roster intact. The data, with the threshold tightened, says both characterizations are right and that they are connected. The drafting is elite. The cap behavior is what allows the keeping to also be elite.
The drafting record
Eighty picks. Fifty-four 500-snap contributors. The pattern across rounds is unusual.
| Round | Eagles hit rate | League hit rate |
|---|---|---|
| R1 | 90% (9 of 10) | 94% |
| R2 | 100% (12 of 12) | 83% |
| R3 | 89% (8 of 9) | 71% |
| R4 | 73% (8 of 11) | 62% |
| R5 | 64% (7 of 11) | 46% |
| R6 | 20% (3 of 15) | 34% |
| R7 | 58% (7 of 12) | 24% |
The first round is league-average. The second round is the league’s outlier: every Eagles second-round pick from 2012 through 2022 produced at least one 500-snap season. Twelve for twelve. Names that show up in that group include Lane Johnson (2013, technically R1 pick 4 but a marker year), Zach Ertz (2013, pick 35), Jordan Hicks (2015, pick 84), Carson Wentz (2016, pick 2), Dallas Goedert (2018, pick 49), Miles Sanders (2019, pick 53), Jalen Hurts (2020, pick 53), Landon Dickerson (2021, pick 37), and Cam Jurgens (2022, pick 51). The third round runs at 89 percent. By round four the Eagles are still 11 percentage points clear of the league average. Round six is the only weak spot.
The seventh round is its own argument. Seven hits on twelve picks (58 percent) against a league rate of 24 percent. Jordan Mailata (2018, pick 233) is the obvious one: a rugby convert who has played 5,979 career snaps and started 6 seasons. Jordan Poyer (2013, pick 218) hit elsewhere but was originally an Eagles draftee. Jalen Mills (2016, pick 233) crossed 6,361 career snaps. Patrick Johnson, Casey Toohill, Joe Walker, and Beau Allen filled out the group. Volume late-round picks are usually a coin flip. The Eagles flip the coin and it comes up heads more often than the league average says it should.
The annual record is steadier than fans would assume. The 2018 draft hit on every selection (5 for 5), built around Goedert and Mailata. The 2022 class hit at 80 percent (4 for 5), early enough that the rate could shift. Even the cohort years sit between 60 and 75 percent through the entire window. There is no Roseman year that washes out as a near-miss the way some of his peers have had a 2017 or a 2019 quietly underperform.
Three first-round picks anchor the early-window build. Fletcher Cox in 2012 (pick 12) played 8,830 career snaps and started 12 seasons. Lane Johnson in 2013 (pick 4) has played 11,153 career snaps and is in his thirteenth season as the franchise right tackle. Carson Wentz in 2016 (pick 2) hit at 6,696 career snaps before the 2021 trade to Indianapolis. The 2017 Derek Barnett pick (1.14) is the closest thing to a first-round near-miss: 4,129 career snaps, three career starts, off the team after his rookie deal expired. The first round has not produced a Mailata-tier value pick, but it has not produced a bust either.
The retention picture
Of the 25 Eagles draftees from 2017 through 2021 who produced at least one 500-snap season, 8 are still on the 2025 roster. That ranks third in the league behind the Bills (54.2 percent) and the Chiefs (45.0 percent), and it puts Philadelphia ten percentage points clear of the next teams down: Indianapolis and New Orleans, both at 32 percent on smaller cohorts.
The retained group is the spine of the current contender: Jalen Hurts (2020, pick 53), DeVonta Smith (2021, pick 10), Landon Dickerson (2021, pick 37), Dallas Goedert (2018, pick 49), Milton Williams (2021, pick 73), Avonte Maddox (2018, pick 125), Josh Sweat (2018, pick 130), and Jordan Mailata (2018, pick 233). The franchise quarterback. The number-one wideout. The starting left guard, left tackle, and tight end. The two interior defensive linemen drafted in 2018 and 2021. The eight names cover quarterback, receiver, tight end, two offensive line spots, and three defensive line spots.
The 17 picks who hit and are no longer in Philadelphia tell the second half of the story. Jordan Hicks (free agent to Arizona). Carson Wentz (traded). Nelson Agholor (free agency). Derek Barnett, Sidney Jones, Rasul Douglas, Mack Hollins, Nate Gerry (cycled out at second-contract decision points). Miles Sanders (left in 2023). Jalen Reagor (traded). The pattern is not random. The Eagles have churned through second-tier wideouts, edge rushers, and linebackers and held onto the offensive line, the franchise quarterback, and the trench-based defensive identity. Every retained name is a position that the franchise has chosen to control through the draft rather than through the free-agent market.
This is what the cap behavior is for. The voidable years, the back-loaded restructures, the multi-year extensions that move money out of the current cap window. The fan-readable version is that the Eagles play accounting games. The roster-readable version is that the games are how the eight cohort retentions stay in the building when most of the league’s top drafters are paying market rates that price out the third or fourth keeper.
The cap mechanics are the unsexy half of the cohort retention story. The voidable years, front-loaded cash structures, and multi-year extensions that push cap charges two seasons past the cash window are tools other front offices either cannot or will not run at this volume. The Eagles do, and the cohort retention number is the receipt. The pattern is to pay the player at the franchise’s preferred rate, structure the contract so the cap charge lands later than the cash, and use comp picks and a sustained drafting cadence to refill the roster around the retained core.
Also worth noting where the cohort departures landed. Hicks went to free agency. Wentz was traded for a 2021 third and 2022 conditional second. Agholor walked. Barnett, Sidney Jones, Rasul Douglas, Hollins, Gerry, and Sanders all hit second contracts elsewhere. The net of the trades, comp picks, and walked free agents has been positive draft capital coming back, which is the engine that keeps the next cohort’s hit rate fed.
How this extends prior work
Josh Dubow’s AP retention piece in September 2025 ranked teams using a binary roster snapshot of the 2021 through 2024 draft classes. By that snapshot the Eagles ranked roughly mid-pack, in part because the heavy 2018 cohort fell outside the four-year window. Our window is longer (2017 through 2021 for the cohort, 2012 through 2022 for hit rate), our hit definition is sharper (500 snaps in a single season instead of binary roster), and the cohort cut is positioned at the second-contract decision deliberately. The full methodology table is at /methodology.
The threshold change between the original version of this piece and this one is a useful demonstration of the methodology decision. At 100 snaps the Eagles’ second round looked elite (the rates were similar). At 500 snaps, the second-round rate stays at 100 percent and most of the league drops, opening a 17-point gap. At 100 snaps Roseman’s cohort retention was 21.21 percent, mid-pack. At 500, it is 32 percent and third in the league, because the higher threshold drops the denominator faster than it drops the numerator. Process scoring lives or dies on the threshold choice, and the choice should match what fans are actually asking.
The counterpoint
The strongest case against the Eagles’ top-line numbers is that the retention rate’s denominator is a smaller cohort than its peers’. Philadelphia produced 25 hits in the 2017 through 2021 window. The Ravens produced 32. The 49ers produced 29. A team that drafts heavier and produces more cohort hits is mathematically penalized on the retention rate, and a smaller cohort is easier to retain at a high percentage. Buffalo, the league leader in retention, produced 24 cohort hits, almost identical to Philadelphia’s, so the comparison there is honest. Against the bigger drafters the Eagles’ third-place ranking should be read with a small-sample asterisk, especially against Baltimore at 32 hits and 28.1 percent retention.
The case against the drafting rate is that round-by-round volatility remains. The 64 percent fifth round is solid; the 20 percent sixth round is weak. Three picks across fifteen sixth-round selections is below the league baseline at 34 percent. Roseman drafts more sixth-rounders than most of his peers and converts fewer. The pattern is consistent across the window: the second-round and seventh-round outliers carry the team rate, with weaker mid-late rounds in between.
The bigger and harder critique is that “hit rate” measures one thing. It does not measure whether the hit was a starter or a rotational piece. Adding career starts data from a future column would split the Eagles’ fifty-four hits into starters and contributors, and the franchise’s pattern is that the cohort retention names are heavily weighted toward starters while the cohort departures lean toward rotational pieces. That is the next refinement in the rubric, and it will reweight the rankings against teams whose hit pile contains more career backups.
What it means
Two teams in the league rank top-five on both drafting and retention. Kansas City and Philadelphia. The Eagles’ organization has spent fifteen years getting credit for hitting in the draft and grief for the cap behavior that comes with it. At the threshold that matters, both characterizations are right and the second one is what makes the first one durable. The drafting is elite. The cap behavior is what holds the cohort together when most of the league’s best drafters lose theirs.
The shape of the second-contract decisions on the 2023 and 2024 classes will determine whether the build-and-keep pattern continues. Jalen Carter’s first extension. The cap geometry around Hurts after 2027. The Saquon Barkley deal as a vector for whether the franchise is willing to spend on positions it has historically rented. None of those decisions are in the rear view yet. The Roseman model holds for now, and the model is what every other drafting-elite franchise has tried and failed to execute.