Jihaad Campbell can be a big help to the Eagles ... by stopping teams that want to be like the Eagles

So it looks like Howie Roseman and the Eagles have spent the last year lining up all the preconceived notions and stereotypes about their team-building methods and strategies and knocking every one of them down.

Gone are the days when anyone could say with any semblance of certainty that the Eagles didn’t value linebackers, didn’t value running backs, didn’t value the positions that were essential to the manner in which football used to be played.

They were once at the vanguard of a seismic shift that transformed the NFL, that made finding great quarterbacks and passing the ball to score points and rushing the passer to stop teams from scoring points the primary aims of the league’s most successful franchises.

The Eagles hired Andy Reid and let him work. They drafted Donovan McNabb and chased other prospective franchise QBs and edge rushers galore. They used analytics and weighed risks and rewards to become more daring in their play-calling, especially on fourth down. They went 46 years without drafting a linebacker in the first round … until Thursday night.

» READ MORE: What makes Howie Roseman better than ever as Eagles GM? His former right-hand man explains the ‘insatiable desire.’

But these last 12 months have seen them shift again, to an old way that seems new again. They signed and re-signed Saquon Barkley. They stumbled into an All-Pro middle linebacker with Zack Baun, then kept him for big money, too. But the first round of the NFL draft proved that acquiring and retaining Barkley and Baun weren’t necessarily outlier moves. By trading up one spot to select Alabama linebacker and South Jersey native Jihaad Campbell, the Eagles are setting themselves to be prepared for the league’s next big change. And they should be prepared for it. They helped initiate it.

“We think he’s a versatile player who can do a lot of different things,” coach Nick Sirianni said. “Obviously, the main thing you see is the energy he plays with, the speed that he plays with, and when you’re playing with the relentless effort that he plays with, that fits on defense.”

A 6-foot-3, 244-pound linebacker who does what Campbell did in college, who came up as an edge rusher then took on more coverage and run-stopping responsibilities, is a player who would fit any defense. And the Eagles are right to bet that they’ll need players who can fit any defense, because the Eagles just showed everyone around the NFL that a team can rely on its running game and still have an explosive offense.

They were last in the league in passing attempts during the regular season. Their greatest big-play weapon was Barkley, who between the regular season and the postseason had seven rushing touchdowns of at least 60 yards. They scored seven rushing touchdowns just in the NFC championship game. They threw the ball when they had to — Jalen Hurts did that and more in Super Bowl LIX — but they were a ground-and-grind team first and foremost.

» READ MORE: Jihaad Campbell’s journey began at Timber Creek

What’s the tiresome cliche, that the NFL is a copycat league? It’s fair to expect other franchises to mimic the Eagles’ approach, to try the same thing. And just because those teams are a step behind the Eagles doesn’t mean Roseman, Sirianni, and defensive coordinator Vic Fangio don’t have to stop them from mimicking the Eagles. So even though Roseman lauded Campbell’s pass-rushing skills early Friday morning, minutes after the Eagles had made their pick, he made it clear that Campbell can and will have to do more than just chase down quarterbacks.

“Vic does a tremendous job of getting guys with pass-rush ability to be versatile players like that,” Roseman said. “What’s really fun is, those guys who have that versatility go out on the edge and get pressure as a rusher — he’s got speed. He’s got power as an edge rusher. He was trained as an edge rusher. And he’s got versatility to play off the ball and blitz from depth and play in space, in pass coverage as an off-ball linebacker. The things you can do keep all these players on the field.”

The Eagles with their offensive line and Barkley and Hurts and the Tush Push, the San Francisco 49ers with Christian McCaffrey, the Baltimore Ravens with Derrick Henry and Lamar Jackson, the Atlanta Falcons with Bijan Robinson: More and more teams in recent years have built themselves to run the ball. An average NFL team threw for just 217 yards a game last season, the lowest such mark since 2008.

Sure, Roseman is right: A defense has to stop the pass. But it ignores the run at its peril, and if Campbell turns out to be the linebacker the Eagles believe he will be, he’ll be effective in any scheme, against the run or the pass or anything else.

“You just look around the league,” Roseman said. “The teams that we have to get through to get where we want to go, they have fast, explosive quarterbacks and players in their backfield who we’ve got to bring down at all levels of our defense. We need a tremendous amount of front-seven players to contain those guys. It’s always been a priority for us. We believe in affecting the passing game on offense and defense, and this guy can affect the passing game.”

» READ MORE: Howie Roseman still thinks of himself as an outsider. It gives the Eagles a big edge in the NFL draft.

And the running game. The running game matters again. It matters as much as it has in years. It matters so much that the Eagles did something Thursday night that once would have been unthinkable for them, something that really made all the sense in the world.