Eagles Coach Sean Desai Handicapping Safety Position?
PHILADELPHIA - There’s competition and then there is confusion. There’s open-mindedness and there’s indecision.
The glass-is-half-full crowd might point to the Philadelphia Eagles safety competition opposite Reed Blankenship and rest assured that good players being pushed will work itself out in a positive fashion. Then there is the half-empty cynical bunch, a demographic most veteran reporters count themselves charter members of.
We’ve seen too much to buy into the peaches-and-cream narrative.
As the Eagles' summer has marched on you would have expected that the race to play next to Blankenship on the back end of the Philadelphia defense would be whittling down.
Instead, the Eagles seemingly added Justin Evans into the mix on Saturday by giving the free-agent pickup the most first-team reps at practice for a safety not named Blankenship, the first time that’s happened for Evans over 13 practices open to reporters.
That was curious to me so the decision was made to open defensive coordinator Sean Desai’s pre-practice Sunday presser with an Evans query.
“I think he's right in the thick of [the safety competition] with Terrell [Edmunds] and K'Von [Wallace] and Sydney [Brown],” Desai told SI.com’s Eagles Today. “There's a really good battle going on at safety right now."
The claim is that the Eagles have wanted to roll combinations to figure out what they have.
“Like I told you guys last week, we just keep trying to roll combinations," Desai said. "That was the function of that, is we are trying to keep getting different combinations of people together, get them communicating with different people, and then try to find what we think eventually is going to be our best matchup to fit that.”
As they say in this business – watch what they do, not what they say.
The idea that the Eagles came into camp in late July with a plan to rotate combinations that would finally end up with Evans at the top of the pecking order seemed confounding so a follow-up was proffered by Eagles today:
“How much is that sort of the pre-plan of rolling guys versus maybe somebody who played well during the pre-season or practice?
“I think it's a combination, but we've kind of stuck to our plan the whole way through, even before we were in games,” Desai said. “We don't anticipate changing from the plan."
Sounds like planned uncertainty which is the opposite of what any NFL team wants in late August.
On Sunday, all four candidates got first-team looks with Edmunds starting the practice and Brown finishing it with Evans and Wallace getting reps in between.
Over the course of 14 practices, Edmunds has had the most reps next to Blankenship followed by Wallace, Evans, and Brown but the latter two have picked up while Wallace has stepped back a bit. Edmunds seems to have stayed relatively steady.
For now the favorite for Week 1 at New England has to remain Edmunds followed by the upside of Brown because he’s the player the Eagles want to eventually get to.
A piecemeal approach until that end game is a real possibility.
“I think the biggest thing for us is we're always going to be open-minded to try to find the best matchups for our guys,” Desai said. “That will not change as we go throughout the whole season because that's really what this thing is about, it's about trying to put our best players in positions to make plays against their best players and try to win as many plays as we can in a game.
“Eventually the outcome will be what the outcome will be.”
The very existence of Blankenship and his successful seizure of the other spot defines a realization that the Eagles are only “open-minded” because they haven't found the player that can stamp out the uncertainty.
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-John McMullen contributes Eagles coverage for SI.com's Eagles Today and is the NFL Insider for JAKIB Media. You can listen to John, alongside legendary sports-talk host Jody McDonald every morning from 8-10 on ‘Birds 365,” streaming live on YouTube. John is also the host of his own show "Football 24/7 and a daily contributor to ESPN South Jersey. You can reach him at jmcmullen44@gmail.com or on Twitter @JFMcMullen
