The Eagles on Wednesday morning placed middle linebacker Nakobe Dean on the Active/Physically Unable to Perform list as the team kicked off training camp with its first practice.
He’s the only Eagles player with a designation.
Dean, 24, suffered a torn patellar tendon in his left knee in the wild-card round win over the Packers in January and has been rehabbing since.
This isn’t a surprise, especially not after defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said this spring that Dean “won’t be back for a while.”
The PUP list is for players with football injuries that pre-date training camp. Players on the Active/PUP list can be removed at any time. But in the interim they cannot practice and still count toward the team’s 90-man roster.
The Active/PUP list is different than the Reserve/PUP list. But a player must be on the former to eventually be placed on the latter at final cuts. Any player who is eventually placed on the Reserve/PUP list must miss a minimum of four weeks to begin the season. In Dean’s case, that seems like a possible outcome.
Before his season ended on Jan. 12, Dean had a breakout year for the Super Bowl champions. In the regular season, he started 15 games and finished with 128 tackles, 3 sacks, 6 QB hits, 4 pass breakups and a game-sealing interception. While Zack Baun earned headlines with his All-Pro season, Dean was the green dot linebacker in the middle of the league’s best defense.
With Dean out for at least the beginning of training camp, the Eagles will have Baun returning as their top linebacker after signing him to a three-year, $51 million deal this offseason. They also moved up one spot to No. 31 to draft Jihaad Campbell out of Alabama.
Campbell, 21, missed a lot of the spring as he recovered from shoulder surgery but did participate on a limited basis in the mandatory minicamp date in June. If he’s healthy enough, Campbell figures to be a strong candidate to replace Dean as a starting linebacker next to Baun.
But during the spring, second-year player Jeremiah Trotter Jr. got a ton of those first-team reps and might get more in training camp. Trotter, a fifth-round pick out of Clemson last year, played just 104 defensive snaps as a rookie but got a chance to learn the defense and was a key special teams contributor.
The other linebackers on the Eagles’ 90-man roster are Smael Mondon, Lance Dixon and Dallas Gant. The Eagles drafted Mondon out of Georgia with a fifth-round pick in April.
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