By Tim Kelly, Sports Talk Philly editor 
March of 2015 was perhaps the craziest month in the history of the Philadelphia Eagles. LeSean McCoy felt the brunt of it.
On March 2, 2015, Mark Eckel wrote for NJ Advance Media that while the Eagles wouldn't release McCoy, as they had with his teammate DeSean Jackson the prior offseason, they could trade him in an attempt to move up for Kelly's former college quarterback Marcus Mariota. While Mariota ended up with the Tennessee Titans, he was on to something with McCoy.
If there was any thought that the Eagles were pushing this information to the media in an attempt to get McCoy to restructure his contract, those thoughts were quickly erased. A day after Eckel's report, the Eagles traded McCoy and his $11.95 million cap hit to the Buffalo Bills for linebacker Kiko Alonso – straight up.
In an in-depth look at McCoy's career, he told Kimberly A. Martin of The Buffalo News that he had no idea who Alonso was when he was informed of the trade:
While McCoy napped after an offseason workout in Miami, text messages flooded his cell phone. And when he finally awoke, his entire world had changed: He had been traded.
The news, finally delivered by his agent Drew Rosenhaus, was devastating.
“The first thing he told me was, ‘Shady, this is not a joke. You’ve been traded to Buffalo. For Kiko Alonso,’” McCoy said, gazing straight ahead as if transported back in time. “I said, ‘Drew, stop playing. …Who the hell is Kiko Alonso?’
“You can quote that,” McCoy said, cracking a smile. “I didn’t know who that dude was. I looked him up. …I was pissed. I didn’t want to come.”
That the Eagles traded McCoy wasn't entirely shocking. In fact, prior to the deal he had told the NFL Network's LaDanian Tomlinson privately that he didn't think he would return to Philadelphia for the 2015 season. But how quickly the trade came together – it reportedly took 20 minutes to complete the trade – who he was traded for and where he was traded was shocking.
With all due respect to the city of Buffalo, upstate New York isn't exactly the ideal destination for players to be traded. And with all due respect to Alonso, he wasn't the type of player that you would have expected to be traded straight-up for the Eagles' franchise-leader in rushing yards.
The trade, on the surface, ended up being a disaster for the Eagles.
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McCoy, who some suggested at the time of the trade was nearing a decline, did have an injury-riddled first season in Buffalo, but he bounced back in a big way in 2016, rushing for 1,267 yards and 12 touchdowns on a career-high 5.4 yards-per-carry. He enters the 2017 season within striking distance of 10,000 yards for his career and has at least an outside chance to reach 12,000 on his career, a number that would make him a lock for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Alonso, on the other hand, suffered a partial ACL tear early in his lone season for the Eagles. He did still play in 11 games, but never seemed particularly healthy.
There is some more nuance to the trade, though.
In trading McCoy for a player on a rookie-scale contract, the Eagles cleared nearly $12 million off of their books. This allowed them to go on an offseason spending splurge, which included landing Sam Bradford in a trade, while signing DeMarco Murray, Ryan Mathews and Byron Maxwell in free-agency.
If that sounds like a disaster, it was. Kelly was fired before the 2016 season ended, going from looking like a genius to becoming nearly universally disliked by those in and around the organization rather quickly.
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However, it wasn't all bad. Maxwell and Alonso, though neither was effective in their season with the Eagles, were packaged with the No. 13 pick in the 2016 NFL Draft in a trade that netted them the No. 8 pick in that same year's draft. That pick eventually became part of a bigger trade with the Cleveland Browns, when the Eagles traded for the No. 2 overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft, which they used to select quarterback Carson Wentz.
With Wentz in the fold, the team was freed up to trade Bradford to the quarterback-desperate Minnesota Vikings, landing them a 2017 first-round pick (that turned into Derek Barnett) and what will end up being a fourth-round pick in next year's draft.
If all of that sounds like a stretch to avoid facing the reality that the McCoy trade in itself was a disaster, it probably is. Had the Eagles found a way to land Wentz and retain McCoy, we may be talking about the Eagles as a serious NFC contender this season.
Once you get passed all of that, McCoy not knowing who Alonso was when he was traded for him is pretty funny, especially since many Eagles fans had a similar reaction upon the trade occurring.
