Eagles Urged to Pursue Journeyman Tight End

Getty Dan Arnold smiles and points to a teammate from the sideline.

With the trade deadline passing on October 31, there are only so many moves the Philadelphia Eagles can make with eight weeks to go in the season. There is, however, some speculation that the Eagles could make a late-season plunge into free agency. According to Matt Holder of Bleacher Report, the Eagles should consider pursuing tight end Dan Arnold.

He’s especially intriguing because starting tight end Dallas Goedert went down in the third quarter of the Eagles’ Week 9 win over the Cowboys with a fractured right forearm.

“In addition to Goedert, Grant Calcaterra has a concussion, which will really test the Eagles’ depth at tight end,” Holder wrote in a November 13 story on each NFL team’s “roster weakness” after Week 10. “While the team does have Jack Stoll and Albert Okwuegbunam to turn to, it couldn’t hurt to bring in a veteran like Arnold, who knows the playbook after spending training camp with the Birds. He could at least serve as an insurance policy in case of an emergency.”

The 28-year-old journeyman went through camp with the Eagles but was released in late August. Previously, he played for the New Orleans Saints, Arizona Cardinals and Jacksonville Jaguars.

Dan Arnold Had a Good Prospect Profile Coming Into the NFL

As a raw undrafted prospect, Arnold was attractive to teams because of his athletic profile. At 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds, he ran the 40-yard dash in 4.68 seconds, and it was tempting to picture Arnold blazing down the sideline of Lincoln Financial. His times in the 20-yard shuttle and three-cone drills at the 2017 NFL scouting combine were among the top 10% of all tight ends ever to run those drills at the combine. So, what are we missing?

Arnold was a big fish in a small pond in college. He saw a ton of usage as a wide receiver at a Division III school, Wisconsin-Platteville, going for over a thousand yards in his senior season. Still, Arnold hasn’t been able to find consistency in the pros.

In 2021, Arnold discussed the difficulty in transitioning from playing wide receiver in college to tight end in the NFL.

“I think the biggest thing was ‘Holy crap, there’s a lot of information to know,'” Arnold said, according to Panthers.com. “Just the nature of the position, the protections, we’re in the run game and also the route concepts. There’s just a lot of information you have to know.”

Arnold graded out higher than 74.5, according to Pro Football Focus, and that was in 2018, his second year in the league. From 2020 to 2022, he graded in the low 60s, putting him at the bottom of the list of the top 32 tight ends in the league.

In his best year in the NFL, he was still able to catch four touchdowns, accumulating 438 yards through the air for the Cardinals. He also has a good catch percentage for his career at 66%. These statistics can’t tell the whole story about a player, but they do suggest that Arnold could contribute to the Eagles. He could even be a valuable piece in a playoff run.

Eagles Could Make History in Next Stretch

Weeks 11 through 14 represent one of the most challenging stretches of the Eagles’ regular-season schedule. Head coach Nick Sirianni and the Eagles will need all the firepower they can muster as they face the Super Bowl-winning Chiefs and Andy Reid, the bye master, in Week 11, the Bills in Week 12, the San Francisco 49ers in Week 13, and then their inter-division rival Dallas Cowboys in Week 14.

The Eagles are off to one of the best starts in franchise history at 8-1, but some experts, including Josh Tolentino of the Philadelphia Inquirer, expect them to lose more in this stretch than they did in the first nine games of the season.

Still, if Jalen Hurts can heal up over the bye week from his lingering knee injury, the team can regroup for this stretch, possibly with some fresh signings (like, for example, Arnold), then fans could have reason to hope that this team could actually put together the best season in franchise history.