Devin White release puts the onus on Eagles LBs Nakobe Dean, Zack Baun to hit their stride

Nakobe Dean and Zack Baun like to compare their roles in the Eagles defense to an eraser.

One day after the Eagles doubled down on the starting inside linebacker duo by releasing Devin White, Dean acknowledged that the pair can cover for the rest of the defense if they play at a high level consistently.

“We can erase everybody’s mistakes,” Dean said Wednesday. “Front end, back end, don’t matter. Sometimes you just have to know, if we do our job first, everything else will follow.”

Emblematic of the Eagles defense as a whole, the team’s first four games have featured uneven play from the Dean-Baun partnership with both highs and lows. Despite that, the team elected to release White on Tuesday, putting the onus further on the starting pair to find consistency after the bye week.

“We have real conversations with each other,” Dean said. “First of all, the whole team I feel like, but we need to be more consistent in our high-level play. We need to go out there and do the things we’re supposed to do, game in and game out, that’s all we need.”

The Eagles elected to release White after the 26-year-old was beaten out by Dean during training camp and spent the first four weeks of the season as a game-day inactive player buried on the depth chart. The Eagles granted White’s release before the trade deadline, allowing him to sign elsewhere without being subject to waivers, in exchange for potential financial relief from the one-year deal he signed in March with $3.5 million guaranteed.

“It’s just a product of the league,” said Dean, who noted that White was his host on a recruiting visit to LSU in 2019. “It happens. I know wherever he goes, they’re going to bring him up fast and he’s going to rock out. I talked to him afterward, I’m nothing but happy for him and whatever he goes and does.”

During his Wednesday news conference, Eagles coach Nick Sirianni commended White for the way he handled getting benched after taking the majority of the first-team reps during training camp.

“Since Devin got here, I just thought he was a really great pro,” Sirianni said. “He’s handled everything with class. I know it was a hard situation for him to be in, a guy that’s started a lot of games in this league and has been successful in this league. And I can’t say enough good things about Devin personally and how he handled a disappointing situation for him.”

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Sirianni also gave a vote of confidence to the team’s linebacking corps without White, consisting of Dean and Baun as the starters with Jeremiah Trotter Jr., Ben VanSumeren, and Oren Burks serving as special teams contributors.

Sirianni said Trotter has shown enough to suggest that the fifth-round rookie is capable of being the team’s backup middle linebacker, something that could be tested sooner rather than later considering that Dean was a limited participant in Wednesday’s practice with an ankle injury.

“It just gives you a perspective of what we feel about the rest of that room,” Sirianni said. “The guys that we have in that room and how they’ve been executing, I look forward to growing with those guys that we have.”

After missing most of last season with foot injuries, Dean has gotten his first extended time as a starter this year. He’s second on the team with 26 total tackles, including four for losses along with one pass breakup. A converted outside linebacker who signed with the team in free agency, Baun leads the Eagles defense with 43 tackles. He’s got a team-high two sacks as well, both of which came in the team’s season opener against the Green Bay Packers.

“My confidence is really high,” Baun said. “I’m feeling very, very comfortable in the positions I’m in and what I’m doing. And playing next to Nakobe, who has been doing it his whole life, has made it a lot easier, too.”

Still, both Baun and Dean have struggled at times this season. Baun’s shaky defense against the run was one of the main factors in the team’s Week 2 loss against the Atlanta Falcons and Dean missed a team-high five tackles two weeks later against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers according to Next Gen Stats. The Eagles defense ranks 30th in yards per attempt conceded in part because of the inconsistent play from the linebackers, something they’ll have to fix coming out of the bye week.

“Of course that game was a bad fundamental game,” Dean said. “A lot of people were mad that we missed tackles, of course. Trust me, no one was more mad than I was at myself. Missing tackles is a fundamental thing. It’s just like a wide receiver missing a wide-open catch, it’s something that we’re supposed to do, it’s fundamentals.”

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Sirianni said the coaching staff would implement different drills to address the growing number of missed tackles. During the portion of practice open to the media, defensive players went through a circuit in which they tackled safeties coach Joe Kasper into a mat to simulate taking ballcarriers to the ground.

For him and Baun to become the erasers they aspire to be, Dean said, it will start with sessions like Wednesday’s.

“It’s just coming out in practice and working on those fundamentals,” Dean said. “Thudding in practice, making sure we’re in great position in practices, and actually working on it in the tackling circuit we’re going to do today. It’s things like that.”