Eagles training camp: Fletcher Cox, Brandon Graham, and other issues that could sabotage the 2023 season

In speaking recently with a former NFL executive who has extensive knowledge of the Eagles, we agreed that this edition of the team might be the best in the franchise’s history. Of course, since curmudgery is the foundation of our decades-old relationship, the conversation turned to what lurking issues might sabotage the Birds’ run back to the Super Bowl.

It was a strenuous exercise. The head coach is hot, the GM is hot, the owner is hot, the quarterback is hot, the star skill players are young and still ascending. Over the past decade, the offensive line has been one of the best in NFL history, and it remains so. Everything has fallen into place.

It was, therefore, a chore, to conceive how, outside of an avalanche of injuries, the Eagles might falter, but we managed.

Eagles players report to training camp on Tuesday. Most of the worst-case scenarios could start to present themselves by the end of camp. All have about a 50% chance of happening. None, on its own, would ruin the 2023 campaign, but if even a couple of these possibilities become realities, this season could fall short of expectations.

In 2021, the talented, veteran Eagles defense needed seven weeks to digest a defense that new coordinator Jonathan Gannon described as “simple.” Seven weeks was light speed, since it usually takes teams a full season.

Gannon left for Arizona after the Super Bowl, run out of town by a fan base that detested his largely passive scheme. His replacement, Sean Desai, promised to be more aggressive. By the end of camp, we should have a sense of just how aggressive he can afford to be.

The schedule breaks in favor of Desai: Patriots, Vikings, Buccaneers, and Commanders. With apologies to fading Minnesota mirage Kirk Cousins, the Eagles won’t face a top quarterback until they see Matt Stafford and the Rams in Game 5.

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The Eagles offense finished third in the NFL in total yardage last season. It should be even more potent this season. Gannon usually played with a lead. Aggressive defenses that make mistakes give up touchdowns, which facilitate comebacks.

Will Desai risk too much with a defense that might not be ready?

Nobody appreciates Fletcher Cox more than I do, but he’s 32. He just finished his worst season, according to profootballfocus.com, despite logging seven sacks, third best in his 11-year career. He did this despite playing the fewest snaps of any healthy season since his rookie year.

Brandon Graham is 35. He just finished his third-best season, according to profootballfocus.com, and collected a career-high 11 sacks. He did this because he played the fewest snaps of any season in which he was not injured since his rookie year.

Both expected to have to leave the only team they’ve ever played for, but the Eagles kept them for one more year. Cox got $10 million. Graham got $6 million. That’s a $16 million gamble that two high-character, high-mileage thirtysomethings don’t fall off the cliff across which every NFL player eventually stumbles. How they present in camp should hint at whether they’re on a precipice.

This has the potential to be the best cornerback tandem in franchise history ... or a catastrophe to the magnitude of Asante Samuel-Nnamdi Asomugha.

Bradberry turns 30 next month, but he had the best coverage season of his career last year. Slay, 32, was very good compared with the rest of the league, but was not the lockdown cover corner he’d been in the past. The Eagles’ receivers will test them at camp.

Maybe both looked better because they played with safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson, who tied for the league lead with six interceptions. Or maybe they were, in fact, the most elite component of a defense that led the league by allowing just 179.8 passing yards per game.

About being elite ...

This topic was the main reason for my conversation with the NFL source.

After being traded from Detroit to Philadelphia in 2020, Slay told the Detroit Free Press in graphic detail the fateful 2018 interaction between him and Patricia, who then was the Lions’ rookie head coach:

“He told me in front of the whole team, in the team meeting room, showed clips of me in practice getting a ball caught on me or so in practice,” Slay said. “I posted a picture [of a wide receiver on social media], and he told me, stop [performing a sexual act on him].So I’m like, ‘Whoa.’ I’m like, ‘Hold up.’ Where I’m from, that don’t fly. ‘Cause I wouldn’t say that to him. I wouldn’t say to him to stop you-know-what to Bill Belichick. I wouldn’t do that. That’s just not me as a man. That’s disrespectful to me, and so from there on it was done with.”

Just why the Eagles added Patricia is unclear. Detroit fired Patricia after the 2020 season. He went back to New England in 2021 as an adviser, then and helped run the offense in 2022, jobs in which he also failed.

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Slay has said his interactions with Patricia so far have been “cordial.” How cordial will they be when they see each other every day for a month?

Slay and his wife, Jennifer, are as popular in the Eagles’ locker room as anyone in recent memory. She makes the team banana pudding on Fridays.

This is nitroglycerin in the back of a pickup truck: One rough bump and things could explode.

Jordan Davis and Jalen Carter anchored the best defense in college football history ... and anchored is the proper adjective. The Eagles drafted Davis in the first round in 2022 and then took Carter in the first round this year. Both exited college with serious concerns about conditioning. Carter also carried questions about his maturity.

Davis improved as 2022 progressed until he injured his ankle. Carter is even more talented. But there’s no room for much of a learning curve when you play in the middle of a defense set on a Super Bowl run. If they’re making mistakes in the next few weeks, or if they show up out of shape, the Eagles will have a problem.

Again, no one has been more bullish on Nakobe Dean than I have. He was the best player on that Georgia defense.

But he’s an undersized middle linebacker at 5-foot-11 and 231 pounds. As a rookie last year, he wasn’t able to unseat ordinary veteran T.J. Edwards. And he’ll be asked to run a newly installed scheme as a first-time starter. No one will work under a more penetrating microscope this camp than Dean, but it’s as if he’s being set up to fail.

The Eagles are hoping against hope that their safety corps — undrafted second-year man Reed Blankenship, veteran backup Terrell Edmunds, third-round rookie Sydney Brown, fourth-year backup K’Von Wallace, and Justin Evans, who didn’t play from 2019-21 — isn’t torched too badly too often.

This issue ranks so low because it’s not something that might go wrong; it’s certain that the safety spot will be targeted, and will falter. That will be the most obvious shortcoming at camp.

Then again, the rest of the team is so damn good it probably won’t matter when the season begins.