June 22, 2023

Creating the best $15 Eagles offensive lineup

If you had $15 to spend to construct the perfect Eagles team, who would you pick?

By Shamus Clancy
PhillyVoice Staff

An activity that could have sports fans shooting the breeze for hours is trying to craft the perfect lineup. There have been online prompts for this for years, especially using $15 to create the optimal team from a list of players who are given values between $1 and $5.

The Eagles' social media team released a version of that for the Birds on Wednesday night. I received a ton of texts and saw a lot of Twitter chatter about which players are the best bets with your $15:

Spend wisely 💰#FlyEaglesFly pic.twitter.com/MrCFwVaOU9
— Philadelphia Eagles (@Eagles) June 21, 2023

There's a lot to unpack there, so I'm going to give my own choices. In terms of my decisions here, I'm making a team built around the idea of winning a single game, not for the entirety of their career or a whole season. If you had one game for all the marbles, which Eagles legends are you riding with? Let's get after it...

Quarterback: Nick Foles ($2)

Donovan McNabb and Randall Cunningham are bad values at $5 and $4, respectively. Jalen Hurts for $3 is great, but, again, if I'm trying to win a single game I'm taking the dude who's turned in the two greatest performances in franchise history in Foles for just $2. Going Foles over Hurts gives me additional cash of course to go grab some other elite players.

Running back: Brian Westbrook ($4)

Westbrook is the best running back in franchise history to me, better than even LeSean McCoy. The way he's a threat out of the backfield as a receiver combined with his patience as a runner gives an offense a great level of versatility. Westbrook would Christian McCaffrey if he played in the modern NFL.

Wide receiver: A.J. Brown ($3)

Harold Carmichael is a Hall of Famer and had tremendous longevity as an Eagle, but I don't think anyone truly believes that he's a better receiver than Brown, who balled out in Super Bowl LVII on the biggest possible stage. He's a steal at $3.

Wide receiver: Terrell Owens ($5)

Owens is the best player flat-out on this entire chart. In Super Bowl XXXIX, he had nine catches for 122 yards on a broken leg. If the Birds somehow pulled out a win over New England, he'd have been Super Bowl MVP. He's a top-three receiver in NFL history behind Jerry Rice and Randy Moss. Next.