The Eagles have lost a ton of key defensive players in the last week and they’re going to miss them.
Milton Williams, Josh Sweat, Darius Slay and Oren Burks are signing elsewhere in free agency and C.J. Gardner-Johnson was traded to the Houston Texans in a move made for long-term reasons.
It was inevitable that the Eagles were going to lose talent this offseason but now they have to replace those players.
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The clearest path to replacing all those guys is continuing to draft and develop young players on defense. The Eagles have eight picks in next month’s draft and should have even more in 2026 thanks to the compensatory pick formula.
But drafting talent isn’t enough. You need to develop it.
And the good news is that the Eagles have a defensive coaching staff that has proven its ability to develop young talent. They did it in 2024 when we saw growth from pretty much all of their young players from Jalen Carter to Quinyon Mitchell to Cooper DeJean to Nolan Smith and more.
The best chance for the Eagles to have a successful defense despite the exodus is to rely on Vic Fangio and his staff to develop young players. Fangio and his staff are back in 2025 and will have an integral role in making sure the defense doesn’t tumble from its No. 1 ranking in the Super Bowl season.
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Kellen Moore and the Saints sniffed around Eagles defensive backs coach and defensive passing game coordinator Christian Parker for their DC job but went another direction, which was great news for the Eagles. That means that Fangio’s position coaches — Parker (DBs), Roy Anderson (CB), Joe Kasper (S), Bobby King (LB), Clint Hurtt (DL), Jeremiah Washburn (Edge) — are all coming back in 2025.
The last time the Eagles went to the Super Bowl they also lost talent. After falling to the Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII to cap the 2022 season, they lost Javon Hargrave, T.J. Edwards and Gardner-Johnson and didn’t do a good job replenishing the defense with young players.
But they also didn’t have the staff in place in 2023 to develop young talent either. After Jonathan Gannon left for Arizona, the Eagles had already lost the chance to bring in Fangio and settled for Sean Desai, who was demoted during the season in favor of Matt Patricia. When Gannon left he also brought Nick Rallis with him as his DC so the Eagles ended up hiring D.J. Eliot, who had little NFL experience, from Temple. And when Dennard Wilson was passed over for the DC job that went to Desai, he left for Baltimore and the Eagles simply promoted DK McDonald to replace him.
The Eagles were probably too hesitant to play young players in 2023 but even if they had, it would have been hard for them to succeed. And because of the disarray of the Eagles’ defensive coaching staff that season — things got worse as the season went on — it’s hard to even get a fair evaluation of the younger players who did see the field.
Things should be very different in 2025.
The expectation is that this coaching staff, along with the developmental staff (Connor Barwin, Matt Leo, Patrick McDowell) will be able to get the most out of the players who will be tasked with replacing these departing veterans.
Is there any guarantee that Jalyx Hunt can replace Sweat? Or that Moro Ojomo can replace Williams? Or that Sydney Brown can replace Gardner-Johnson? Or that Kelee Ringo can replace Slay? Or that Jeremiah Trotter Jr. can replace Burks and hold down the fort until Nakobe Dean returns?
Of course not. In fact, the odds that all of that will work out just aren’t great.
But the Eagles’ plan is to keep bringing in talent in the draft to supplement their top-heavy roster, especially on offense, and the key role of the coaching staff will be to develop those players.
At least this staff has shown that ability.
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