Safe to say Eagles cornerback Darius Slay didn’t have a great relationship with head coach Matt Patricia in Detroit.

In fact, he straight-up said that he did not respect the Bill Belichick disciple based on an incident that took place during 2018 training camp.

This via a fantastic interview with Dave Birkett at the Detroit Free Press:

“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 sucking this man’s private. 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.”

…

“Your first impression always your best impression,” Slay said. “Like I said, I would never disrespect him in that way. And for him to be able to tell me I’m out here sucking another man’s crank because of a picture I post, I ain’t like that. And it took me a whole nother level.”

Patricia responded to that via a spokesperson, saying he believed private conversations with Slay were “constructive and satisfactory.” Birkett cites another source who refers to Slay as a “cancer.”

Either way, I think it’s pretty clear that he needed a change of scenery. Doug Pederson and Jim Schwartz are veteran coaches. They’ve always been described as player-friendly guys who exhibit “emotional intelligence” and all of that. Slay gets a new start in Philadelphia after spending his entire NFL career thus far in Detroit, a franchise that has not won a playoff game since 1991.