Eagles Need To Be 'Optimistic Realists' With Young LB

The Eagles are pinning their hopes at MLB to Nakobe Dean again but would be wise to have a contingency plan.

Nov 3, 2022; Houston, Texas, USA; Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Nakobe Dean (17) / Maria Lysaker-USA TODAY Sports

PHILADELPHIA - If the Eagles are a star-studded bunch on offense, the theme on the other side of the football has to be uncertainty.

And maybe no position has more question marks than off-ball linebacker. Philadelphia has penciled in Nakobe Dean and Devin White as the starters barring any stab at the position on Day 2 of the upcoming NFL Draft.

Dean and White were college superstars in the SEC. The former was the Butkus Award winner as college football's best linebacker on the 2021 national championship Georgia team. White was so good at LSU that he won the same award three years prior and turned into the No. 5 overall pick in the 2019 NFL draft. White even tried to tilt Dean to LSU before the Mississippi native decided Athens and the Bulldogs were the better fit.

White has at least played a lot of NFL football, however. Dean remains strictly projection entering Year 3 of his career after spending his rookie season as a backup to the durable T.J. Edwards with only 34 defensive snaps to his credit. Dean was then short-circuited by a pair of foot injuries in 2023, the second of which required surgery that halted his first foray as the Eagles' starting middle linebacker at just five games with four starts.

Dean started his rehab on a Roll-A-Bout, graduated to a walking boot by February, and now expects to be fully cleared imminently as on-field work for the 2024 season begins in May.

It hasn't been easy.

"The mental side is always hard, but we talk about having a dawg mentality all the time and I feel like it starts with being mentally strong," Dean said. "I'm an optimistic realist, so I'm always real about my situation, but I'm always optimistic.

"The only thing I continue to do is work and everything else will take care of itself."

"Optimistic realist" is a great phrase to describe what the Eagles need to be with Dean moving forward.

It's fine to double down on a player you believe has a significant upside but there also has to be a contingency plan in place in case the undersized Dean's durability continues to be an issue.

He fell to the third round of the 2022 draft because some teams had concerns over a shoulder issue, something the New York Giants went public with and Dean has now been having problems finding cleats that are comfortable for him due to the feet issues he's been having, according to a team source.

Then you have the hurdle of a fourth defensive coordinator in three years for Dean with Vic Fangio coming in after Jonathan Gannon and last season's debacle of Sean Desi being replaced by Matt Patricia.

"You watch film and you see his defenses over the years and how they evolved and different things they do," Dean said of morphing to Fangio's mindset. "Of course, we haven't been able to talk ball yet, but just knowing the type of coach he is, I'm just excited to get ready to work with him, excited to get ready to just learn the scheme, and take it as my own."

When it comes to scheme, the good news is that Gannon and Desai were basically cover bands for the original, which is Fangio. Some of the terminology will be different but the underlying philosophies should be familiar.

Also new is linebacker coach Bobby King, who arrives from Tennessee to replace D.J. Eliot, a one-and-done mentor afetr Nick Rallis left with Gannon for Arizona.

At 23, Dean is the leader of a room that includes White, who is trying to resurrect his career after things went south in Tampa Bay, veteran LB3 Oren Burks, a solid backup and special-teamer coming in from San Francisco, athletic 2023 undrafted free agent Ben VanSumeren, and Brandon Smith, a 2022 fourth-round pick in Carolina.

Dean offered a quick scouting report:

"We [are] all kind of high-energy guys who love ball, who [are] going to take whatever is thrown at us," Dean said. "We don't complain about it. We're just going to take it for what it is and push through it. We're going to be oak trees and not pine trees. We're going to stand strong in the wind."

Optimism says Dean will be the strongest of those oak trees.

"I know I may have been out of sight, out of mind because of the injuries, so I'm here now," he declared.

Behind the scenes at the NovaCare Complex, realism must creep in to suggest adding a Day 2 oak at off-ball LB in the draft is not the worst idea in the world.

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