4 Reasons Jason Peters might return to Philadelphia Eagles in 2020

2. Talk about being mentioned for the wrong reasons.

Following the 2018 NCAA football season, Andre Dillard won First-team All-Pac-12 honors and was seen as the second-best tackle in the draft behind Jawaan Taylor. The Eagles, possibly due to fear that the Houston Texans might have taken him, traded up in 2019’s NFL Draft to select him with the 22nd-overall selection.

Most of us, the Eagles organization included, didn’t know him when that happened. We’ve had right around a year to get to know him since then, and ladies and gentlemen, there are issues.

Sure, he needs time to develop. That’s a fair statement for any man entering his second season in the NFL. Coaches can help him with technique, but it’s hard to make someone mentally tougher than they already are.

To his credit, all ‘Big V’ wanted to know where he was playing. The coaches plugged him in, and yes, he had his struggles from time to time, but he had a lot of success too. The Eagles don’t win a Super Bowl without him.

Matt Pryor is the same type of dude. He’s a “just tell me where I’m playing” guy. The same can be said about Isaac Seumalo. Then, there’s Andre Dillard.

The coaches push him too hard in practice, and he cries. The fans boo, he can’t handle it. He admitted being uncomfortable with the passion and, at times, the angst of the Eagles fans in an interview with NJ.com’s Mike Kaye that followed the 2019-2020 season. Here’s a quote.

"(The) fans (and) media, they’ll hate you one minute and then love you the next. That’s the big difference I learned. Just going from a small city to a big city, in itself, is a lot different."

Then, there was that thing about him playing right tackle versus the Seattle Seahawks. You remember. That’s when he gave us that strange explanation for why it would be hard for him to do so. It wasn’t the issue of him failing at right tackle. Heck, ‘Big V’ looked bad in his first start versus Ryan Kerrigan. The issue was that he seemingly accepted defeat and had all of these issues with being flipped over to the other side of the line before the game even began.

Philly invested a lot in this guy, so it’s easy to see why they want him to play. Heck, he has to play, but if you can’t look at this guy and see that there are some legitimate concerns, you’re fooling yourself. Are you starting to see why Philly wasn’t quite ready to let Peters go now? They let Sam Bradford go when we thought Carson Wentz would sit for a year, didn’t they? There didn’t seem to be any problems there.