Eagles Coach D.J. Eliot Moves Down The Street, Talks Nakobe Dean & LB Group

The first-year NFL assistant coach wants his linebackers to be good tacklers and has been impressed by Dean's eagerness to learn

PHILADELPHIA – Coaches in any professional and college sports lead a nomadic life, with such little stability for most that they’re usually packing and moving on to another city every few years.

So, when the opportunity to move across town from Temple University to the Philadelphia Eagles came along, D.J. Eliot couldn’t help but be interested.

“I’m probably one of the few people when you take a new job you don’t have to move,” he said. “I was at Temple last year, so took the job. One day I went down Broad Street, I went right (to Temple’s campus), the next day I went down Broad Street and went left (to the Eagles’ facility).”

Eliot, 46, was hired this offseason to be Philly’s linebacker coach, replacing Nick Rallis, who followed former Eagles defensive coordinator Johnathan Gannon to Arizona after Gannon became the Cardinals’ head coach.

All of his stops, and there have been 12 of them since getting into coaching in 1999, were at various colleges. His longest stint was four years at the University of Kentucky, where he spent four years as the Wildcats' defensive coordinator and linebacker coach.

He had put feelers out letting contacts know he would be interested in taking over for Rallis. First-year Eagles defensive coordinator Sean Desai got wind of it and texted him, asking him if he wanted to interview.

Eliot was vacationing in Colorado, where he was the defensive coordinator and linebackers coach from 2017-18, and became familiar with Eagles linebacker Davion Taylor.

Of course, Eliot said yes to Desai's text. One little detail: Desai wanted to interview him the very next day.

Undeterred, Eliot boarded a plane to Philly, landed at 4, and was seated for his interview at 5.

Three hours later, after the interview, Eliot drove home. The next day he got a call from coach Nick Sirianni, who asked him to lunch.

“I went and met him for lunch, came down here (to the NovaCare Complex), met everybody, met Howie, met the entire organization, and by the end of the day I was working for the Eagles," he said.

"It was really a great opportunity for me. I think that I had the opportunity to interview and present exactly my vision for the linebackers and exactly what I could bring to the staff, I thought was just a great opportunity and it worked out and I’m very excited about it.

During the two interviews, Eliot had a chance to present his vision for linebackers.

The Eagles, remember, don’t have much-proven depth behind Nakobe Dean and Nicholas Morrow. Heck, even Dean is an unknown commodity at the NFL level after getting just 34 defensive snaps as a rookie.

It’s a young group, and development will be crucial for the group.

“All the things that make a great linebacker are the things that we’re emphasizing this offseason with the number one thing being tackling,” said Eliot. 

“To be a great linebacker, you have to be a great tackler. We’re really working hard to make sure that we’re working drills that put those guys in position to make plays and to make plays to be great tacklers.”

Eliot added that he has been impressed with Dean.

“Right when I got hired, I called all the linebackers,” he said. “I talked to Nakobe for about five minutes. I was really trying to get to know him and he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s great coach, can you give me the playbook?’

“He is very, very serious about it. He’s a student of the game, and that was my first impression of him. He was here to learn, he wanted to learn, and he wanted to get started right away. I’ve been impressed with him through OTAs, too.”

Dean was part of the Eagles' Super Bowl run last year. 

So was Eliot in a sense.

“It was great,” he said. “Me and my family were rooting for it. We were part of the community. My son would come down, take the train down, and not go to the game, but just walk around in the parking lot and all that, then he would take the train back.

“He did that for three or four games just to be a part of it, and some of his stories were probably the best stories. He would say they’d get into the train and there was no room for more people, but somehow, they would find a way to get one more person into the train to get over the Linc. It was quite an experience.”

And now Eliot will experience the NFL and hope to stick around for a while.

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Ed Kracz covers the Philadelphia Eagles for SI's EaglesToday.

Please follow him and our Eagles coverage on Twitter at @kracze.

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