Q. Talk about the guys you picked today.
JOE SCHOEN: Yeah, so Eric Gray is a guy we liked. He was at the senior Bowl. Played at Oklahoma, transferred from Tennessee. Super productive. Really good hands out of the backfield. Also has some elusiveness to him inside. Like what he brings. He also has done some returns in his past; he did some at Tennessee, comfortable catching punts at Senior Bowl. So again he'll come in and compete with our group.
Tre Hawkins, took him late in the sixth. From Old Dominion corner, height, weight, speed prospect that has high upside. He's a physical kid, not afraid to tackle. You see a trend with some of these guys that we took at that position.
Good developmental prospect for Wink's defense and projects well to special teams due to his physical traits and toughness.
Jordon Riley, again, big body guy. It's hard to find these guys. So when you get into the 7th round, you are looking for guys that maybe it will be hard to get at different areas. And another guy we spent time with, big run stopper in there, 6'5, 330. He'll compete for a depth role there.
Gervarrius Owens, another guy we like, tall, long, athletic safety from University of Houston, was out at the East West Game. Another physical kid. Projects well to special teams and also compete for a depth role.
Excited with the group of guys we have got. All have very good traits. Competing for different roles but excited with the group.
Then get the text here soon that the draft is over, and now we're working on the second draft with free agency, college free agency, which is an exciting time for us.
Q. Can you talk more about Riley? He was not somebody that was listed by too many.
JOE SCHOEN: He's at Oregon. So you walk out to practice and there's this 6-5, 330-pound guy, piques your interest right there. Again some of these guys in different schemes may not have the production, the tackles, the sacks. But for what Wink looks for in terms of size, length, knock back, he possesses those traits.
Q. Can you talk about the whole thing overall, did you fill all the needs you want or are there still things out there?
JOE SCHOEN: Yeah, we are always going to be looking to continue to improve. We'll never be satisfied. We'll continue.
Again, right now is another opportunity to add players and depth in competition with the college free agency process. Then we'll have a rookie mini-camp next weekend, so we'll have some players that will be here for that.
So ideally we have a bunch of 53 Pro Bowlers, but that's impossible. We'll continue to find maybe where we need to add depth or maybe light on a starter or whatever it may be, but we'll continue to add depth and competition at all times.
Q. As part of the off-season, you talked about how you wanted to add depth along the defensive line, which you've obviously done. Do you feel like you have enough depth among edge rushers?
JOE SCHOEN: Yeah, and that's something, again, we can continue to look for that. Again, I think we have Elerson -- showed promise but had an injury last year. Fox is a guy we like. So those guys have all played snaps, and we're excited about them and we may add a couple tonight or again, we continue to look at our emergency list.
So we are all weighing those two things, what's available post-draft based on how teams drafted over the weekend, there may be a surplus of players that become available next week. We'll continue to look at all positions and measure where we are if we like our group or not, and again we don't play until September in terms of the regular season, so if we're devoid of something somewhere, we'll continue to look.
Q. Gray was saying he feels he has natural hands. How important is that for you for a running back, for your offense, that seems to project that he could potentially be a 3-down guy?
BRIAN DABOLL: We'll see. Again, I just go back to -- I think the question you asked, we always look to add and improve all the way through the season, from Tuesday when we have off.
In terms of Gray, he's a very mature young player that's had some production. Does have good hands. How that sorts out, that will be up to him. The cool thing about it is after the rookie weekend, they come back, and we'll finally have an auditorium full of seats. So coaches will be standing on the side and finally have a full auditorium to start working with.
Q. I wanted to ask you about your process in terms of the trades the first two days because I thought it was interesting. Sometimes you see GMs who might not have the trust of other teams, guys you talked to; you mentioned the deal you have with Trent balky. You guys obviously exchanged information. For you how important is that to build relationships where you're sharing some of your plans, some guys dont' want to give away too much information and feel like it may come back and burn them but do you feel like that has helped your process?
JOE SCHOEN: Yeah, I think again a lot of these, Trent and I were area scouts back in the day. So we have a long relationship mor some of the new GMs, Kwesi, Minnesota, we have become fast friends through this process. We were first-year GMs together.
So you always try to cultivate those relationships throughout the league because when you're thinking about, hey, I may trade Player X, may name comes to him first that they are going to call me, whatever it may be. You always want to be in the mix if a team trades a guy. It's always important to have relationships with the general managers and personnel staffs of the other teams because it can lead to deals or maybe it's easier to get a trade done or whatever it may be.
Definitely in that group where we were picking on specifically Thursday night, I had a good relationship with a lot of those guys. They were easy conversations. We could shoot each other straight and luckily it worked out.
Q. Are you ever fearful of giving up too much information?
JOE SCHOEN: Yeah, you definitely have to be careful of that. Yeah, you definitely have to be careful of that. But if a trade was contingent on you giving up the information, you might as well -- that's your only chance to get there. There's some risk involved if you do that.
Q. Looking back compared to maybe what you thought coming into the Draft, what would you have thought if I told you you were going to get Banks, Schmitz and Hyatt in the first two days of the Draft?
JOE SCHOEN: Yeah, I would have liked to know how you're going to do that, probably. Like it really wasn't -- again, you never know how it's going to fall. We went through a million scenarios. We didn't know who was going to be there at 25 or we ended up trading up to 24, so you really don't know.
And things get a little bit more, once you get into that second round, everybody sees things differently and has different flavors for the type of players they like. You may have a guy in the fifth round, he goes in the second; beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As you go through the entire draft, usually the first round goes as planned, the group of players you think are going to go.
But I'm thrilled with those guys and I'm thrilled with some of the prospects we got today. We'll see. And the coaching staff is motivated to work with all the guys that we drafted and they are going to come in and assimilate into our culture and work hard and see what happens. Everybody is going to compete for their spots. I'm happy with where we are and it's a good group of guys to work with and continue to build.
Q. Don't know when the next time we'll talk to you will be, do you plan to he reengage with negotiations with Saquon?
JOE SCHOEN: Yeah, we'll have conversations with him. We have; we had conversations last week.
Q. Would you like -- going by the assumption Saquon is going to be here, play this year, would you like to draft a running back and decrease his snaps? Do you find that sustainable for a running back to play eight plus percent of the snaps, and is that part of the reason why you wanted to add to that position?
BRIAN DABOLL: Yeah, I'd say it's probably a better question during the season. We're in -- what is it, it's not April 17th, what is it, April what? 29th. So we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Q. Was it important to you that you drafted a running back that was a guy who could catch the ball out of the backfield?
BRIAN DABOLL: Look, what I tell Joe and the scouts is find good players. People that you can -- you don't always necessarily agree, whether it's scout-to-scout, coach-to-scout, coach-to-coach. But you sit down and you talk about these players.
I'm excited about all these players. I think there was a lot of good discussions, and I think you just find good players. And then your job as a coaching staff, I'll say this until I'm done coaching is get good players and find a way to use them.
So necessarily, you have a playbook but our playbook really isn't finished quite yet. We just added some players and we have got to do a good job as a staff, too, of going out there on the practice field and trying different things and seeing how people respond, and running different routes or doing some different blocking schemes.
Again, every playbook, for me, I'd say the last five or six years has just been a little bit different and that's based on the players that you have. So as a coach, I tell Joe, find good players, man. These guys have been working their tails off since, really, the start of the last draft at the end of it, and the coaches have been working hard to try to evaluate them.
Again, you don't know what you're going to get until they are out there doing it, too. So that's why we're big on competition. We're excited about the players we have but we'll throw them in the mix and let them compete it out.
Q. Where does Gray's skill set lend the potential to be a passing down option early in his career?
BRIAN DABOLL: We'll see. Start looking at him in rookie mini-camp. Again, I think they all have a good skill set and we have spent a lot of time watching tape and talking to some of these guys.
But until they are out there doing things on the grass in front of you; and you can tweak things. There's times where you thought you were getting something, one draft with a player, and then all of a sudden, you're like, man, this guy can do this a little better than I thought, so you start doing that more.
They will all have fair opportunity to go out there and prove what they can do to see if they can help us.
Q. There was the contract that was offered originally, the contract was off the table. Would you plan on offering another revised extension to Saquon in the coming week?
JOE SCHOEN: We'll talk this coming week now that the Draft is over. We'll reconvene and see if it makes sense or not through dialogue with his representative.
see if it makes sense or not, through dialogue.
Q. Salary-cap wise, do you need to make a move? Are you good, just to get through, now that the Draft is over?
JOE SCHOEN: If we need to we have moves that we can make to free up cap space. So yeah, we are working through some things over the next couple weeks.
Q. Since we're on topic of contracts, where do things stand with Dexter and those negotiations?
JOE SCHOEN: Same deal. Let's get through the Draft. His representation had a lot of prospects in the draft and we were focused on the Draft in our meetings. Next week, things will calm down a little bit and we'll circle back up with everybody.
Q. From your vantage point how unusual is what the Eagles are doing leaning so hard into one program? Can you think of any other time that a team has done this, drafting so many players and acquiring so many players from one team and does that come with risks or --
JOE SCHOEN: Well, if you're going to do it, that's a good program to do it from. You have so ask them that. I'm not really sure. Sometimes your board just falls that way. Yeah, they have got a lot of Georgia players down the road.
I don't know if they necessarily consciously are doing that, or again, I'm assuming their board fell that way.
Q. Do you feel good about this draft?
JOE SCHOEN: I do. I do. Yeah, it's not just this draft. This is one piece of the off-season puzzle. So I think you tie in free agency and you tie in the draft and I'm excited to go upstairs and see where we are on some undrafted free agents.
And kind of how I started, it never stops. We are always looking to upgrade and add depth and competition. Where we are now, I feel good, but again, we still have to get these guys on the field.
And all these guys are young. All these draft picks are young. They have come from various spots. Some of them have not been to New York City and some of them have. They are pros. There's a human element, too, as these guys develop. We are not going to put a lot of pressure on them to be plug-and-play. We'll let them he develop and learn and continue to let them grow in our culture.
But yeah, right now I feel good about where we are, and as a staff, we have continuity amongst the staff this off-season, which along with the roster building I think that was very important.
Q. There was so much publicity with the draft, how do you feel about the "he killed it" narrative?
JOE SCHOEN: That lasts about two days. You don't win games in April. The social media rankings and everything like that, you know, it's about what we do this fall and how we go out there and compete when it matters and how we continue to build this off-season and get bigger, faster, stronger, through our strength program and then how we prepare and execute in August, I think there's a process.
And do I like some of the guys we drafted? Yeah. But still, like Dabs said, you know, in this press conference, every year is different and the team has got to gel and we have got to build chemistry. We have to stay healthy. There's a lot that goes into it.
Q. You're in this a long time. When do you think you'll be able to look at the sheet and look back and say, yeah, I think we killed it?
BRIAN DABOLL: The minute after of that? You talking about the minute after the Draft?
Q. When would you think you would be able to look back at a sheet?
JOE SCHOEN: I think it's three or four years when you look back, you look at the play time. But you're never -- you can't get complacent in this business, ever. You'll have a lot of trouble if you do that.
So again we are always looking to get better regardless where it is. We'll never be complacent. We'll always strive and there will be a standard of excellence and we'll continue to strive for that.
Q. You think back to last year --
BRIAN DABOLL: Pick 25 and not five, didn't want it carry the magnets around -- begged the owners for a new draft room.
Q. Setting it up, you obviously wanted things a certain way and you had ideas last year, I'm curious now after this Draft, one of the things I noticed was it looked like you guys had FaceTimes with the entire room on screens with your prospects, was that part of it you wanted to make it more of a team thing for everyone in that room?
JOE SCHOEN: Yeah it's a really neat feature and we could use that pre-Draft because you could Zoom with a prospect, so if there was ever a scenario where Dabs, myself, Wink, Jerome wanted to get in there, hey, let's Zoom with this prospect and talk ball, and we could all be in there and have those type of meetings; and it's a universal room that we can use for free agency draft, medical meetings, Zooming prospects.
So just trying to upgrade the technology the best we could and make it multi faceted in terms of how we could utilize it. We did that, and one of the cool things we wanted to do was FaceTime the prospects afterwards in the draft room and congratulate them one or time oncoming to the team. Just a cool feature. Nice touch for the players.
Q. Just a couple of you guys that would get a chance to interact with the prospect, scouts, ownership, is that important to you to make sure that this entire aspect of it is the full team?
JOE SCHOEN: Yeah, absolutely. Like Dabs was just saying, the scouts are away from their family a lot during the year, a lot of miles on the road, a lot of hotel points and All-Star games and then being here for weeks at a time away from their family. A lot of hard work that goes into it from the medical staff and all the guys that they look at the Combine, the calls they make for us, go on and on about it's really all hands on deck in a true team effort to put this together.
Q. I assume in the next 48 to 72 hours, you get the free agents signed. When do you guys decompress?
JOE SCHOEN: Every time I think -- like when you come in in the morning and there's like nothing going on, you've got to take advantage of it, because sure enough, something comes through the door at some point, and the day you thought you were going to have all this free time turns into three or four things you've got to deal with.
I think now that I've actually thought about this, hopefully next week at some point I can. But it's a different process for me. I've kind of been full circle now, because when I got here, I had already seen 500 prospects, I had a really good feel for the Draft.
This year, I had not been through a season as a general manager and trying to watch film and see prospects and all that stuff. Now that I've been through the whole thing full circle, I think next week would be a good opportunity for me, I think I'll be able to decompress a little bit.
Q. Like you said, this year you had other things to worry about. Do you find yourself relying on others on your staff more heavily?
JOE SCHOEN: Oh, absolutely, yeah, you have to be able to delegate in this position and get the right people in the right chairs and let them do their jobs. We have got a good group throughout the building in a lot of seats.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports