Eagles trading C.J. Gardner-Johnson to Texans

CJGJ is gone again. The Flyers lost again. And Tiger Woods is hurt again.

Time is a flat circle.

Let’s discuss.

In the email today:

• 😔 Eagles trading C.J. Gardner-Johnson to Texans

• 🇨🇦 Flyers remain perfect on homestand with 5th straight loss

• 🐅 Tiger Woods and the tour he carried are ailing

  • 📆 This Day in Philly Sports History

  • 📊 Poll

  • 🔗 Links

  • 📺 Coming Up

C.J. Gardner-Johnson is heading to Houston in exchange for offensive lineman Kenyon Green.

Fans knew the Eagles were going to lose some quality players this offseason. Monday’s departures, including Josh Sweat and Milton Williams, were disappointing but widely expected.

The CJGJ trade, however, comes as a shock. The safety signed a three-year, $27 million contract with the Birds just last offseason, and played well all year en route to the team’s Super Bowl victory.

This marks the second time that Gardner-Johnson, 27, will leave the Eagles after a one-year stint. He recorded six interceptions with the team in 2022, played three games with the Lions in 2023, then recorded six more interceptions after returning in 2024.

CJGJ said he’s not leaving with any hard feelings towards the franchise. He also alluded to financial motivations on the part of the club:

Green, 23, was the 15th overall pick in the 2022 NFL Draft, but has not lived up to first-round expectations. The 6-foot-4, 325-pound guard could replace Mekhi Becton, who could cash in during free agency after reviving his career with the Eagles in 2024.

The Birds may believe that offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland can do for Green what he did for Becton.

Stoutland is the best guy for the job, but fixing Green seems like a tall order. And CJGJ’s absence will leave a significant hole in the Eagles’ talented defense.

At the NFL Draft Combine in Indianapolis, Howie Roseman did warn fans that the club’s offseason was “probably not going to look like maybe what the conventional wisdom thinks it should look.”

Well. That has certainly proven true.

Roseman is the architect of two separate Eagles championship teams, so he’ll get the benefit of the doubt on this move… For now. Hopefully the trade is just one piece of larger plan.

It’s better to be a has-been than one who never was. We spend a lot of time lamenting the Sixers’ miserable season here. A lot of that lament is driven by what could have been.

The Flyers are the never was in this scenario. They entered the 2024-2025 season with a very short list of good players, no great players, and a lot of replacement-level talent.

In the past six weeks, the Flyers traded away three of their good players in Joel Farabee, Morgan Frost and Scott Laughton. Related: The Flyers have lost five straight games on their current seven-game home stand.

The aforementioned trades are at least partly to blame for Rodrigo Abols, Olle Lycksell and Emil Andrae coming back from Lehigh Valley to make up the numbers for the Flyers last night.

GIve the callups a little credit: Abols had one of the Flyer goals, and Lycksell had an assist.

These hockey soclal accounts literally cannot help themselves.

Two other aspects of the game really hurt the Flyers last night.

First, though the Flyers should have been the desperate team given this losing streak, the Senators scored 24 seconds after the opening face off.

Second…it was definitely a night to forget for Ivan Fedotov, who had one goal go in off his face and another one go through his legs.

The Flyers have two more chances to salvage a win from this home stand. Unfortunately, the next chance comes against the playoff-bound Tampa Bay Lightning on Thursday night.

Tiger Woods’ dominance over golf is probably best represented by two statistics. Woods holds the record for most weeks on top of the Official World Golf Ranking (683). He also holds the record for most consecutive weeks on top (281).

As Tiger’s reign wore on and on, the popularity of golf soared. Equipment manufacturers, golf course designers and builders, apparel companies — they all made money because of the Tiger Effect.

Those days are over, as Woods’ health and the PGA Tour he propped up for so long are both struggling mightily in the present day.

Woods’ injury history is significant enough to merit its own timeline, which he continues to add to seemingly every year.

Every time Woods announces he’s going back on the shelf, Golf X gets understandably wistful.

While golf fans undoubtedly miss Tiger’s prime, it was never going to last forever. Time is undefeated. Expecting Woods to play at the highest level in recent seasons at his age (he’ll turn 50 in December) was never realistic.

So it’s not so much that Woods is injured again or that he almost certainly will ever contend in a major championship again. It’s that the generation of players he bequeathed a healthy Tour to haven’t nurtured it or grown it.

Instead, this next generation of professional golfers are the doing the equivalent of stripping the garden of anything edible and leaving the weeds to take over after they’re gone. This phenomenon is best illustrated by the PGA Tour/LIV Golf problem.

Golf fans are also not going to be compelled to rally around Justin Thomas (career earnings: $61M) whining about how stressful the rift between the tours has become.

Tiger Woods did not nearly singlehandedly grow the game of golf to have it end up this way.

And unfortunately, he’s not physically capable of saving the game again.

📆 This Day in Philly Sports History

On March 12, 1997, rookie AI did this to some guy on the Bulls.

📊 Poll

Results from Tuesday:

🔗 Links

• 🏀 Quentin Grimes has more 30-point games for the Sixers this season than Paul George despite not being a Sixer until the trade deadline.

• 🙄 The Texas Rangers had to pull a hat from its merchandise line because it came way too close to saying “boobs” in Spanish.

• 😷 It’s no fun to remember, but we are five years on from when the pandemic shut the NBA down.

• 💉 Former Mets and Red Sox masher Mo Vaughn copped to using HGH as his career wound down.

• ⚽️ Liverpool blew a lead at home and are out of the Champions League.

📺 Coming Up

Games before our next send.

Wednesday, March 12, 2024

• Sixers at Raptors, 7:30 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.

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