Avonte Maddox was active for last Thursday’s win against the Giants, but he only played three defensive snaps and two special teams snaps on his return from injury. Starting at outside corner in his place was Nickell Robey-Coleman, who was originally signed to play in the slot this season.

Moving forward, defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz explained on Tuesday that Maddox is still the Eagles’ starting corner opposite Darius Slay, and provided some insight on his week seven usage:

“He’s our starting corner outside when he is healthy. He was just coming back. It was a difficult week. We started his return to play and we didn’t have any practice, so it was really hard to gauge where he was. He wasn’t 100 percent sure. We weren’t 100 percent sure.

He was active sort of as an emergency player. He got pressed into service on some punt return stuff, and he was doing a good job staying warm in case we needed him. Because of some of the zones that we were playing at the end of the game we put him in at corner. We knew he wasn’t going to have to run 80 yards down the field to cover somebody, but we wanted him in there and he had felt good enough on those special teams snaps and kept himself warm.

He was trending the right way. Looks like he’s definitely trending to being able to get back in there. I thought Robey did a good job subbing in there, but Avonte is an outside corner for us and it will be good to get him back out there.”

Robey didn’t exactly cover himself in glory. He quit on the Daniel Jones 80-yard run and graded 78th out of 87 cornerbacks in week seven. With Maddox back for the Cowboys game, they’ll have two legitimate corners to cover Amari Cooper and Michael Gallup, then you live with NRC on CeeDee Lamb in the slot. Not ideal, that third matchup, but it’s better than the alternative, which would be Cre’Von LeBlanc or Will Parks/Jalen Mills coming down there and trying to deal with him.