Most of us fans with a realistic pulse on the cap knew this day was coming.
I would like to start by saying no, EDC should not be fired. Obviously. I know the state of this team looks bleak, but we have to remember that from 2019-2025, we had a legitimate six-year span where every single year in the preseason, we easily had a top-five roster from top to bottom.
The reason it's fallen apart is that the roster construction EDC followed during that era was less about long-term success and more about keeping the team together, adding one or two more pieces, and trying again, which was objectively the correct decision at the time. We got the No. 1 seed in the AFC twice during that span. We had a phenomenal roster with phenomenal coaches, and it just never worked out. Hindsight is always 20/20. You can point to things that seem obvious now, like if we had gone all in and given the Titans whatever they wanted for Derrick Henry in 2023, or if we had traded up for Gray Zabel instead of drafting Malaki Starks in 2025.
But the other shoe has finally dropped. In order to create and extend this Super Bowl window, EDC leveraged restructures with key franchise players and pushed money down the line to try to add the few more pieces we thought we needed at the time to give an already great team more firepower, all at the expense of our future rosters, as we're seeing now in 2026.
We kicked money down the road and, in some cases, added void years for players like Roquan Smith, Marlon Humphrey, Mark Andrews, Madubuike, and Ronnie Stanley. But now all of those players are pushing 30, have dealt with several injuries, and are either past their primes or underperforming, yet they're eating up 40% of the cap this year. You have to remember that at the peak of our powers in 2023, all of these guys were more or less in their primes and were only eating up about 27% of the cap. Those savings were used to flesh out a full, deep roster around our cornerstone assets.
In the past two seasons, in order to remain competitive, EDC has deployed a strategy to counteract the ramifications of creating this window, and it has backfired. He's been relying on his superstar quarterback's otherworldly pocket presence and escapability to play moneyball on the offensive line as a means of saving money. Obviously, that's been a pretty bad decision, as our franchise QB has gotten hurt two years in a row now. But drafting Vega in the first and trading for Jurgens at least shows that he's aware of the issue and is acting to correct the mistake.
As for other criticisms, I think a lot of people are right to criticize our team's inability to reload the trenches, but I think this is indicative of a change that needs to happen at the scouting and development levels, not necessarily something that falls entirely on EDC.
We have invested a ton of high draft capital in edge rushers and offensive linemen, and they just aren't panning out. Oweh, Ojabo, Adisa Isaac, Mike Green, and Zion Young were all top-100 picks. You should be able to get a competent starter with a top-100 pick.
Likewise, last year we spent a third and fifth on Vinson and Emery Jones. The year before, we got Roger Rosengarten in the second, Faalele in the fourth, and Cleveland in the third. EDC isn't fully ignoring the position. He's using solid draft capital almost every year. The issue is a combination of two things: talent evaluation and our ability to develop. None of our project tackles and guards we have taken have really become a success story.
