Eagles

Cooooooooooper DeJean Will Play Safety in the Eagles’ Base Defense

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: May 22nd, 2026 · 12:01 PM EDT

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Vic Fangio on Thursday:

Q. What’s your view of the safety position next to S Andrew Mukuba? (Zach Berman)

Vic Fangio: It’s open. I think Marcus [Epps] is someone that will put up good claim to it. In base, it will be Cooper [DeJean]. When we go to nickel and Coop comes up and plays nickel, it’ll be Epps. We’re taking a good look at Michael Carter back there. Andre Sam. Then we signed an undrafted free agent, Gush [DB Kapena Gushiken]. J.T. Gray has been mainly a special teams player, but he’ll get a look. We’ll look at all those guys. It’s an open competition.

“In base it will Cooper DeJean.”

That means a four-DB look will have Mukuba and Cooooooop as the safeties and then Quinyon Mitchell and Riq Woolen playing corner. You’re essentially just keeping your best three defensive backs on the field.

Thing is, the Eagles don’t play their base defense very often. In fact, they were in Nickel for 73.7% of the snaps last season, which was tied for the third-highest number in the NFL with the Chicago Bears. They played four defensive backs only 24.2% of the time, which was 24th. That’s according to Sportradar’s data.

The numbers were similar in 2024, the Super Bowl season, when the Eagles played five-DB Nickel at a 79.9% rate.

There aren’t a lot of Eagles snaps with four defensive backs out on the field, and they don’t really have to swap out a DB for a linebacker anyway, because DeJean tackles like a linebacker when he plays in the slot. Last year he played 92% of the snaps, second-most on the entire team, so he was rarely coming off the field. The difference is that CB2 was a weakness then and safety 2 is a weakness now, so they’ll basically just shuffle Cooooop where he needs to be when they aren’t in a nickel or dime look.