The Philadelphia Eagles unveiled their biggest free agent signing in years (maybe ever) this morning at Lehigh University. Nnamdi Asomugha met the Philadelphia media for the first time and revealed that he had his sights set on coming to the Eagles since his contract expired in March.
“When I spoke to the owner and the president here", Asomugha said, "quite honestly, once March came around and we started thinking that there might be a chance that I’m not going to be back in Oakland, we never knew what could happen or if there was going to be a process of trying to re-sign me or anything like that. When we said there was a possibility that I won’t come back, then obviously my team and myself, we had to start looking at other teams. To a man, and woman, everybody that was on my team, they knew that the number one team was the Eagles from March when we were looking at teams. There were a handful of teams at that point. When the Eagles became a possibility, we knew it was a match.
However, he didn’t really know the Eagles were interested in him until almost the last minute. But when they did jump in the race, things came together quick.
“The Eagles never really seemed to be in it. Even for me, you guys were surprised, but even for me. In the offseason, you’re dealing with specific teams and the funny thing about it is you don’t have time to take visits because it’s not a true four month or so free agency. Anybody who knows me knows that I like to take my time with decisions. I’m on the phone and it’s like, ‘Yes or no, what do you want to do, we need to know,’ and I’m like, ‘Give me five minutes,’ ‘We don’t have five minutes, you have to make a decision.’ Everything came really quickly and then when the Eagles expressed interest and became so aggressive and said, ‘We have a chance, we want this, let’s do it.’ It didn’t have to go much further than there.”
He said that in the end, it’s tough as a player to miss the playoffs year after year and that the biggest attraction to Philadelphia was the chance to win.
“It was depressing. Like I told you before, there’s one main reason why you’re playing. You want to win. Obviously, it would be a little depressing. I wouldn’t watch when the playoffs would come around. Maybe I would see some highlights. If I had to go on television and speak about the playoffs, than I would watch a couple things, some highlights here and there. It’s depressing as a player. So you always want to put yourself in position to win games, and that’s what I’m doing now.”