Eagles age inventory, Part III: Defensive backs

With the NFL's free agency period and the draft in the books, NFL teams will continue to tweak their rosters, but for the most part, we can make educated guesses at this point on who each teams' projected starters will be. Earlier this offseason, we took some inventory on Eagles' players' ages, broken up by positional groups, starting with the offense. In cased you missed those, you can find them here:

• Offensive skill positions

• Offensive line

Today we'll look at the defensive secondary. As the chart below shows, the Eagles are tied for the 23rd oldest (or ninth youngest) secondary in the NFL:

• For the Eagles we projected the following starting secondary: Byron Maxwell (27), Eric Rowe (22), Malcolm Jenkins (27), and Walter Thurmond (27). Age is not a concern for the Eagles in their secondary. It's more about whether those players will be good or not.

• Of the four projected starters, Rowe is the most likely projection to be incorrect. He'll battle it out with Nolan Carroll (28) in training camp for the starting job opposite Maxwell. So far Rowe has looked good in OTAs and minicamp, and has impressed the coaching staff. If the competition is even close, I think the Eagles would be wise to let Rowe play, take his lumps early, learn from them, and be a smarter player for the stretch run. 

• Thurmond is the other question mark, but he is the clear-cut favorite to win the starting safety job opposite Malcolm Jenkins.

• We noted Nolan Carroll and Brandon Boykin in the list of players below, just to show where they would fall age-wise in comparison to the rest of the league.

• It feels like Malcolm Jenkins has been in the NFL for longer than he has, especially the way he has taken on a leadership role in Philly, but he's right around the middle of the pack in the NFL in terms of age, at 27.

• There were more starting DBs over the age of 30 than I would have thought. 23 projected starting DBs are over the age of 30, and three more will turn 30 in July.

• The average projected starting DB is 26.81 years old, and the difference between corners and safeties is very little. The average projected starting CB is 26.85 years old. The average projected starting safety is 26.77 years old. Technically, on average, they're actually older than that since we're not calculating to the exact day, but you get the idea.

• If you look at some of the older safeties in the league, many of them played CB earlier in their careers. For example, three of the four oldest safeties listed below (Charles Woodson, Mike Adams, Antrel Rolle) all at one time played corner. If Eric Rowe turns out to be a good player who has a long career at CB, whenever he begins to lose a step he could move to the back end because of his size. By then he'll be far removed from the days he played safety in college, so I'm not sure how much that experience will help him by then, but the fact that he played safety for three years at Utah could give more teams more confidence that he has the skill set to make that move when he ages.

• Here's the entire list of projected starting corners and safeties, league-wide:

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