February 24, 2026
Kirby Lee/Imagn Images
It's Howie #CompPickSeason, AKA "lose a bunch of guys in free agency and don't sign anyone of note" season.
For the second consecutive offseason, the Philadelphia Eagles will almost certainly lose a few starters via free agency, and they aren't likely to spend big money on free agents from other teams. The silver lining is that they will also likely gain a few compensatory picks.
Each year, the NFL awards draft picks to teams around the league that lost more players than they gained during the prior year's free agency period. Those compensatory picks can be anywhere from the end of the third round to the end of the seventh round.
The value of the picks is determined mainly by the value of the contract the departing player has signed with his new team, but there are other factors as well, such as the number of snaps that player has played with his new team and individual honors, such as being named to the All-Pro team.
The Philadelphia Eagles lost four "CFAs" — compensatory free agents — in 2025 free agency. A "compensatory free agent" is a player who qualifies for the compensatory pick formula.
Those players were Milton Williams, Josh Sweat, Mekhi Becton, and Isaiah Rodgers. The Eagles gained one CFA, Azeez Ojulari. The compensatory pick the Eagles would have received for the loss of Rodgers will be canceled out by the signing of Ojulari.
The Eagles are expected to earn a third-round pick for the loss of Williams, a fourth-round pick for the loss of Sweat, and a fifth-round pick for the loss of Becton. The projected compensatory picks, shown here:
| Players lost (APY) - Projected round | Players gained (APY) - Projected round |
| iDL Milton Williams ($26 million) - 3 | |
| EDGE Josh Sweat ($19.1 million) - 4 | |
| RG Mekhi Becton ($10 million) - 5 | |
They'll likely be awarded those extra picks sometime in March. Got it? Cool.
Expect more of the same in 2026, as the Eagles have limited cap space to play with (especially if they trade A.J. Brown before June 1), and, frankly, this free agency class kinda sucks.
The Eagles have four players who will easily earn enough to count toward the compensatory pick formula in TE Dallas Goedert, EDGE Jaelan Phillips, LB Nakobe Dean, and S Reed Blankenship. In our annual "stay or go" series, we have Phillips as a "stay," Goedert as a "go," and although we have not yet published the linebacker and safety editions yet, spoiler, Dean and Blankenship will each be "go." And even with Phillips, though I do think it's more likely than not that he'll return, I'd still have that as pretty close to 50-50.
Those four Eagles players appear in several free agent rankings, via NFL.com, ESPN, and The Ringer:
| Player | NFL.com (top 101) | ESPN (top 50) | The Ringer (top 50) |
| Jaelan Phillips | 3 | 5 | 3 |
| Nakobe Dean | 43 | 48 | 29 |
| Dallas Goedert | 80 | N/A | N/A |
| Reed Blankenship | 96 | 32 | N/A |
Phillips could end up earning over $20 million per season, with Dean and Blankenship possibly getting over $10 million per season each. Goedert could be around $10 million as well.
Howie Roseman sounds like a general manager who is prepared to get raided.
“I think from a big picture perspective, we want to build a team that every year has a chance to compete for championships, that drafts really well and signs their own players and just sporadically goes into free agency," Roseman said. "That's what we're trying to do.
"And sometimes as much as you want to add from outside and you want to change it up, you got to make a decision to keep the players you know have played well and are part of your culture. Can we keep all our guys considering we have, for example, a lot of key defensive starters coming off rookie deals in next few years? No, we are going to have to make choices. For us to sign them, that's gonna limit some flexibility with outside players. So, then you combine that with the fact that teams, because there's more cap room, because the cap has gone up, teams have done a great job of signing their own players.
"And so, you can, you know, just shuffle deck chairs, right, and just say, ‘Hey I'm gonna trade out this guy because he's not ours,’ and maybe it's a better PR move that, ‘Hey, we're active.’ Look we signed this guy, but that means we're gonna have to get rid of one of our own guys, you know, and so everything we do at this point is a trade-off. If we do this, we're gonna have to get rid of that. But I think that... that's the right way really to build teams here to draft, develop, and re-sign.
"And I know that's not flashy. That doesn't mean that we can't do splashy things, but from a broad perspective, if we can keep our players, if we can keep a lot of these young, really good players that we know that we live with, so we know who they are as people, and then it's like a cake, it's like a layer cake. Then you build on top of it with more good draft picks and more good young players, and then the cycle starts again. That's ideally how we'd like to do that. So, that's my little macro vision of how this works and how this should work.
"And I think last year, I said to you guys, over a two-year period, it's going to be hard for us, unless we make major moves to subtract, to really make some sort of splash move that costs money because we like the players we have drafted and want them as a big part of our next few years as well."
Expect the Eagles to target players who either don't cost enough to count toward the comp pick formula, or who have been released by their previous team (and thus won't count toward the formula either).
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