Burgess will not be finding his way back to Philly in '09.


The New England Patriots announced via their Twitter feed that they have acquired defensive Derrick Burgess from the Oakland Raiders for an undisclosed number of draft picks.

The picks given up are believed to be a third and a fifth round pick in 2011 as reported by Michael Lombardi. However, Adam Schefter is reporting that he thinks the Raiders got a third and fourth next year, if not more. He keeps reminding us that New England has three second-round picks next year.

It's also come out now that there were really only two teams ever in the discussion for Derrick Burgess, and that was the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Yes, the Philadelphia Eagles. The same team and same regime that allowed Burgess to walk a handful of years ago after playing such a huge role in their 2004 Super Bowl run.

Apparently, although Andy Reid would never admit it publicly, he realized that a mistake was made by letting Burgess walk. Very rarely does Reid miss when he allows players to walk, but Burgess may have been that rare circumstance.

However, one could argue that the Eagles would have been crazy to pay Burgess the amount of money that he got from the Raiders. Yes, he had his 16 sack season, and even an 11 sack season the year after that, but over the past two years his numbers have significantly dropped.

Eight sacks in 2007 in 14 games, and only 3.5 sacks in 2008 in only 10 games. His production took a dive, and he became injury prone. Over the past two years, he's missed eight games. To put that into perspective, Tra Thomas only missed eight games over his entire 11-year career in Philadelphia.

Now, as I said, one could argue that, but I don't believe that is the case.

Imagine with me, if you will, Derrick Burgess coming off the edge on the right side, while Trent Cole attacked from the left. The amount of pressure would have been astounding, and a real pain for any offensive line and coordinator.

With both of them on the field, which one do you double team? Do you help out your right tackle who ideally shouldn't be as good of a pass-blocker as your left tackle? Well then you leave Cole one-on-one and he'll win the majority of those. Same guys for if you try to double Cole.

The point is that the two of them together would have created an unbelievable amount of havoc and the Eagles missed out on that. Then, Juqua Parker's little pot-run would not be a big deal in the slightest.

But anyway, they've again missed out on that opportunity. They were believed to have offered a third-round pick and a player. Who they offered is still not known, but I'm assuming it will come out in the next few days, if not sooner. It should be quite an interesting name.

It could have been a guy like Hank Baskett, Reggie Brown, or even maybe Juqua Parker or Darren Howard. The Raiders need a receiver, or they may have wanted a DE to replace Burgess along with a draft pick. Either way, it will be interesting.

Burgess will be making a position change with New England as he'll be an outside linebacker in their 3-4 scheme. This will be the first time he's played linebacker, so he may not have the impact that they would like.