A recent report named the Jets, Bucs and Eagles as the teams potentially most interested in signing LeVeon Bell. The Jets we've been hearing about forever, and just as often we hear it dismissed. The Bucs, with Bruce Arians now running things, are also intriguing. But I've been quietly hoping the Eagles would pursue him for a while.
Obviously, the Eagles won Super Bowl LII, so they've been making things work with what they're doing. But they could benefit from having an elite running back like Bell. The last four seasons, the Eagles haven't even had an 800-yard rusher -- since trading away LeSean McCoy after he rushed for 1,319 yards back in 2014.
They've instead gone with a committee approach, and while that's partly by choice, it's partly due to injuries and the limited skill sets of the running backs they've had in those seasons. With Bell, they could have a runner and elite receiving back in the same player.
Bell missed most of the 2015 season and sat out all of 2018. But in the 2016 and 2017 seasons, he gave the Steelers better production than the Eagles got from their top 3 backs combined in the 2017-2018 seasons, and only slightly less than they got in 2016. You have to go back to 2015, when the Eagles had the knockout tandem of DeMarco Murray and Ryan Matthews with Darren Sproles as a receiver, to find the Eagles top running backs being significantly better than what Bell was doing on his own.
| EAGLES RUNNING BACKS (2015-18) AND BELL (2016-17) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Team/Player | Run | TD | Rec | TD | TotYds |
| 2015 | Eagles (Murray, Mathews, Sproles) | 1558 | 15 | 856 | 3 | 2414 |
| 2016 | Eagles (Mathews, Sproles, Smallwood) | 1411 | 11 | 597 | 3 | 2008 |
| 2017 | LeVeon Bell | 1291 | 9 | 655 | 2 | 1946 |
| 2016 | LeVeon Bell | 1268 | 7 | 616 | 2 | 1884 |
| 2017 | Eagles (Blount, Clement, Ajayi) | 1495 | 7 | 264 | 4 | 1759 |
| 2018 | Eagles (Adams, Smallwood, Clement) | 1134 | 8 | 480 | 2 | 1614 |
The Eagles could keep going with the committee they've used the past three seasons. But if Bell is in shape and motivated, he could give them more of a difference-making backfield than they've had the last few years.
--Andy Richardson