How the Eagles are preparing Quinyon Mitchell, Cooper DeJean for graduate-level roles

New York Times

16 hours ago

PHILADELPHIA — The sideline offered a sight line for how the Eagles' overhaul of their secondary may work out.
Quinyon Mitchell was airborne. Tanner McKee may not have seen him. Too late. Mitchell snagged McKee's tight spiral for his second interception of training camp. It was fine timing. Minutes before, the NFL's social media team announced that the league's players voted Mitchell No. 49 in this year's top-100 player rankings. Chasing Mitchell down to celebrate the play: Cooper DeJean, voted No. 60.
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The pairing is unprecedented in the Howie Roseman era. None of the general manager's other back-to-back draft picks had ever secured such immediate stature after such consequential rookie seasons. Mitchell and DeJean reinforced a veteran-laden secondary in 2024 that was in dire need of schematic repairs. They have now advanced from features to footholds. If the Eagles are to again field a premier passing defense as their roster is currently constructed, Mitchell and DeJean may have to flourish in the graduate-level roles their coaches are preparing them to fulfill.
The roles, particularly Mitchell's, are designed to mitigate potential shortfalls at cornerback and safety. The Eagles decided young and cost-effective players would replace Darius Slay and C.J. Gardner-Johnson. They also decided the ones they believed would replace Slay needed a nudge. They traded defensive tackle Thomas Booker to the Raiders to acquire Jakorian Bennett, a 24-year-old cornerback who played through multiple shoulder dislocations in a 2024 season that ended with a torn labrum. The deal is pending a physical, according to a league source.
The position battle between Kelee Ringo and Adoree' Jackson has stagnated. Ringo's inconsistency so far in training camp is foreboding. That Jackson, 29, whom the New York Giants relegated to a reserve role in 2024, is still sharing first-team reps with Ringo at cornerback isn't altogether encouraging. Bennett will soon arrive in a Philadelphia-bound charter, but it may be too tight a turnaround to expect him to play in Thursday's preseason opener against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Barring a Ringo revelation, a Jackson renaissance or a Bennett reinforcement, the Eagles are preparing to leverage Mitchell's versatility to defend their opponents' most volatile receivers. Mitchell is training to travel. He's played both left and right cornerback throughout training camp, following the biggest threat on the field. That was A.J. Brown until the wideout started missing practices Sunday with an injured hamstring.
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Mitchell's performance leading into Year 2 is promising. He hasn't yet surrendered an explosive pass in one-on-one coverage and his ball skills are noticeably advanced. Fangio said Mitchell, as a rookie, wouldn't have caught the interception he snagged last week while covering Brown. Christian Parker, the team's defensive passing game coordinator, said Mitchell already had a 'natural instinct to go toe-to-toe with anybody.' Parker is now seeing progress in Mitchell's processing. He's seeing Mitchell sniff out pre-snap splits, formations and situations to eliminate more plays and routes before they even happen. When asked if Mitchell can be one of the great cornerbacks, Parker quickly answered: 'Yes.'
'I've been around a lot of really good ones and I think that it starts with just how they're built and he's built the right way,' Parker continued. 'He has a natural confidence in himself. He doesn't get rattled. He's always trying to work. So there's very little idle time during practice. When it's special teams, we're working. When the offense is on the field during the scout team period, we're working. Pre-practice, we're working. Post-practice, we're working. He's in the building early. He stays late. He's always about ball. He's always trying to find guys that he wants to watch around the league to see what elements in this game he can add. He just has a huge appetite for development and improving himself. And he's very accountable to himself. So he knows that the load that we need him to carry from here on and what we put on him last year, he has the mental stability for it.'
As confident Parker is in Mitchell's ability to travel, he acknowledged it is not a simple solution. Mitchell's movement affects the coverage responsibilities of the rest of the secondary. Traveling is also rendered moot against receivers in motion. The strength of the offense (and therefore the way the Eagles are defending it) changes when a receiver switches sides in a jet motion, and, if Mitchell were to follow that receiver, Parker said 'you get all discombobulated.' That limits the strategy to teams with a more stagnant pre-snap approach. The Eagles will play six of the 10 teams that used pre-snap motion the most in 2024, according to TruMedia. Among them are teams with distinctly dangerous receiving corps: the Lions and Rams.
There is a captivating quality about watching a cornerback and wide receiver wage war play after play. It's akin to watching the court clear for a competitive one-on-one matchup in basketball. But the Eagles don't have to think back too far to remember that traveling a cornerback signals a deficiency more than it does a strength. Slay shadowed top receivers toward the end of the 2023 season under former defensive coordinator Sean Desai, when the Eagles surrendered the league's third-most passes of 15-plus yards, according to TruMedia. The Eagles surrendered the fewest in 2024. Due to the collective reliability of Slay and Mitchell, both cornerbacks spent the entirety of the season on their own side of the field. When asked how the confidence level in the cornerback battle would dictate whether Mitchell traveled, Parker offered a candid response:
'Last year, if you look at it with Slay and Q, both of them were capable of taking away number one receivers,' Parker said. 'However that pans out this year… We have a couple weeks to try to figure that out what it looks like. Because if you don't need to do it… We're not just doing this for fun. If you need to do something, we're gonna do it. If we don't need to, we're not. So we have a couple more weeks to kinda see what that development looks like and how fast we can make it happen.'
There is moderately more certainty within the safety battle, though it has been marred by injury. Sydney Brown has absorbed first-team snaps in the six practices since second-round pick Drew Mukuba hurt his shoulder while diving to disrupt a pass without wearing shoulder pads. Fangio said Mukuba will 'probably not' be available in Thursday's preseason opener. It's a significant setback for Mukuba. Fangio, who was also fielding Mukuba in dime packages, emphasized how there's no substitute for physical reps. Mukuba returned to the field Friday in a limited capacity, but has only participated in individual drills.
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'I feel good about it,' Mukuba said Sunday. 'I feel like all the meetings, the walkthroughs — we meet more times than we're on the field. So, I feel like that helps a lot knowing that I'm spending more time in the film room, trying to improve, trying to ask all the questions I can ask, trying to lean on the older guys for anything I need help on.'
Mukuba laughingly said he 'won't shut up around' starting safety Reed Blankenship. The fourth-year starter is the source of the majority of Mukuba's questions. Blankenship obliges. So does Brown, who sits next to Mukuba in meetings. But Brown, a 2023 third-round pick, is entering the third week of his first training camp learning Fangio's system after spending the majority of the 2024 season recovering from a torn ACL. Brown played just 79 defensive snaps in 2024; he played 335 snaps in 2023. He started in six games as a rookie, played some nickel, and recorded a 99-yard pick-six against the Arizona Cardinals a week before suffering his season-ending injury in the regular-season finale.
Fangio said he believes Brown has taken 'overall' strides with his 'entire game.' Brown still must 'recognize things a little quicker,' Fangio said, and just 'put some polish on his operation.' Brown is still adjusting to truly playing in the post as a deep safety. He played more than half of his career defensive snaps at Illinois in the box, according to Pro Football Focus. He played close to a third of his snaps as a rookie at free safety. Parker said Brown is still 'learning how to play' while diagnosing progressions from a longer range.
'He's done a really good job of just slowing his brain down,' Parker said. 'You can see it with his footwork. He's slower with his feet. He's more decisive when he has to go. And it's not like a lot of second-change directions that we're having him make. So, he's making a lot of progress in that area.'
Fangio and Parker have spoken with a higher degree of confidence when referencing DeJean, who has been replacing Brown in base packages during training camp. The DeJean Experiment is going well, according to Fangio. The seven-time defensive coordinator said in OTAs he'd be testing DeJean out at cornerback and safety in base packages in an effort to keep DeJean, their starting nickel, on the field at all times. (The Eagles played nickel on 81.2 percent of their 2024 snaps, per TruMedia.) DeJean has only played safety in training camp. Parker said the Eagles still plan on playing DeJean at cornerback, but 'he's starting to kind of get his legs under him at safety.'
A recent play in practice signaled DeJean may already have his safety legs under him. Fangio said DeJean picked up a route that the Eagles had struggled against last year, 'like he'd been a safety his whole life.'
'So yeah,' the ever-blunt Fangio said. 'He'll be a good safety if we ever want, if we need him there.'
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DeJean, a former outside cornerback at Iowa, has often cited how he began studying cornerback, nickel and safety when the Eagles first drafted him because he knew there was a possibility he'd play any of them. The defense's lack of depth at nickel required him to play there in 2024. If the cornerback battle doesn't yield a reliable starter in 2025, perhaps he can play there. (That would require a replacement at nickel: second-team nickel Mac McWilliams is managing a quad injury.)
So far, the Eagles are pleased with DeJean's performance at safety. Parker said DeJean's experience at nickel affords him the added knowledge of knowing where his help in coverage is and where it isn't. DeJean wasn't challenged in the passing game in any of his eight base snaps in Monday's practice, but after each series, he stood next to Parker on the sideline and reviewed his play. DeJean said Parker holds him accountable. They've become close since last season. During a break in a practice last week, the two playfully shadowboxed along the sideline.
'He's been a great coach and a great person to get to know for me,' DeJean said. 'Just by things he sees on the film, if I'm not doing things technically right, he's gonna let me know. And he's always coaching no matter what. So just hold me accountable in the way I play. And he knows how I play. And if I'm not to that standard, he's gonna let me know.'
The team's dependence on DeJean may run even deeper. At the beginning of Monday's practice, DeJean held a field goal for Jake Elliott during an 11-on-11 special teams drill.
'Emergency,' DeJean grinned later. 'If they need it.'
Playful, perhaps. Braden Mann kicked a field goal afterward. By then, DeJean was jogging toward the sideline, where Mitchell was waiting for him.