Eagles News: Dickerson injury, Vic Fangio cosplays Bar Rescue with preseason defense

The Philadelphia Eagles' backup offense beat the tar out of the Bengals' starting defense on Thursday. The vibes were super high going into the weekend, where they were going to have their only open practice of the summer at The Linc.  

Then we got a disgusting reminder that football is a perfect mirror of life, and everything can change in an instant... And that’s when Landon Dickerson went down with a leg injury. In an attempt to try to stay positive, there are a couple of other things we learned this weekend that were good, but they all kind of pale in comparison to the whole, ‘injured Pro Bowl left guard’ thing.

Landon Dickerson goes down with a meniscus injury

Other than figuring out the second cornerback, safety, edge rusher and linebacker, this offseason and preseason have been about staying healthy. If there’s anything that’s going to stop The Birds from having another super awesome season, it’s going to be injuries. So far in training camp, there have been a few, but nothing mega-substantial.

Then we get to Sunday evening, and after two hours of the Eagles' open practice at Lincoln Financial Field, Landon Dickerson went down with a leg injury and had to get carted off the field. That is mega-substantial.

One very notable thing is that when Dickerson got carted off the field, it was in the passenger seat of the cart. When guys leave the field with brutal season-ending leg injuries, they’re normally sitting in the back of the cart with a towel over their heads so they can hide their tears from the 70,000 people in a stadium. Dickerson was in the front of the cart, and his head was towelless. 

If you might think that means nothing, you’re a sociopath who doesn’t understand human emotions.

Yes, this injury absolutely stinks, and there's approximately a 1,000% chance that it’ll show up at some time in the next four months. But the universal truth is that you never want to see a grown man cry, nor do you ever want to see an emergency cast put on someone. Dickerson was neither hiding people from seeing that he was openly weeping, nor was he in an air cast. That’s a good thing.

Now, based on a video taken from an iPhone that was apparently half a mile away, the injury wasn’t a non-contact injury… but it wasn’t a purely contact injury. 

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the videos you take are low quality. As a matter of fact, not zooming in is a great move because that means everything is of equal quality, but if you take a video of something that could change the emotional well-being of millions of people, it would be great if that video didn’t have single-digit pixels when you zoom in on it. The lesson is just never take videos of anything because A. No one cares, and B. If people do care, they are going to be mad at you for recording with a rotten potato.

The responses to that video range from: ‘Looks like he’s weak,’ to ‘looks like his calf disintegrated,’ to ‘eh, just an ankle turn,’ to ‘Achilles is toast.’

That's actually a perfect screenshot.

No one knows anything about anything, except for the people who know everything about everything. I would argue that the other linemen are probably the latter, and it sounds like Jordan Mailata was at Dickerson’s side until he left the field, while Lane Johnson got mad and threw his helmet. 

This whole thing stinks. Hopefully, everyone on Twitter is wrong (which seems like a safe bet), and this is just something minor, but it sure has the vibes of something gnarly. If Dickerson is down for a while, we’re going to be looking at Matt Pryor, Brett Toth, or maybe Tyler Steen at left guard. 

The Eagles drafted Pryor in the sixth round of the 2018 draft. He didn’t do a whole lot, and that was more or less emphasized when he took over at right guard for Brandon Brooks in the hellscape of the 2020 season. 

Since then, he’s gone to the Colts, the 49ers, was part of a terrible Bears offensive line in 2024, and now he’s back at Stoutland University. Hopefully he’s grown since the last time he was in Midnight Green, but time will tell.

Brett Toth is another guy we’re relatively familiar with. He played for Army from 2014 to 2017, dealt with the stuff that goes along with service members trying to make it to the NFL, got picked up by the Eagles in 2019, went to the Cardinals, back to the Eagles, to the Panthers, and now he’s back with the Eagles. 

The fact that he keeps getting brought back tells me that Jeff Stoutland sees something in him. If Stout sees something in a lineman, that’s a good thing. 

On Saturday, Toth talked to the media in a scrum and had some pretty introspective things to say. He was asked if he felt lucky that he’s been in the NFL for seven years.

"Very fortunate. I wouldn’t say lucky. I’m one of those people that you make your own luck… Ben Franklin once said, ‘It seems the harder I work, the luckier I get.’ …Fortunate is definitely a good word. Just being in this room, the culture y’all seen over the years… unbelievable when you look at it, the standard they set… I’m very hard on myself. That’s a pretty difficult standard to match…”

Toth also talked about the hardest part of his job being not knowing which position (backup right or left guard) he would be playing, and he’d ask Jeff Stoutland to surprise him with it. The hope here is that Toth will be able to lock something down if he knows where he’ll be playing. 

There’s a chance Steen, who is shaping up to be the Eagles' starting right guard, could get the left guard spot. He’s had live reps over there in the past, and he’s had success. It really comes down to what Stout wants, and you can’t go wrong by simply following Jeff Stoutland’s intuition.

I don’t know, dude… this whole thing is scary. When we’ve seen this team have some brutal struggles in the past, it’s been because the offensive line has had a tough time. Losing one of the team and the NFL’s best offensive linemen before the season starts feels bad.

Dickerson’s a tough dude, and if he’s not too messed up, he’ll be on the field this season; there’s no doubt about it. You’d just rather have one of your (many) premier players on offense to not have this entire thing happen. It stinks.

By the way, the entire point of this entire piece is to overreact to an injury. Then, in 24 to 48 hours, it turns out he’s totally fine. It’s jinxing an injury. You’re welcome (hopefully).

Perhaps some good news on the matter, though, ESPN's Adam Schefter reported, "Eagles Pro-Bowl guard Landon Dickerson is thought to have suffered a meniscus injury to his right knee, per sources. Dickerson is getting additional options to determine the next course of action and how long he might be sidelined."

It sounds like Dickerson is going to get a second opinion or something like that. People have played on bad meniscus, but getting it cleaned up before the season starts seems like it's probably the healthy/smart move.

The anti-jinx was objectively, a failure.

Scheduled failure

Vic Fangio’s a real Jon Taffer. On Bar Rescue, Taffer sends 100 people into a bar to all simultaneously order drinks from a cross-eyed bartender who’s never made a single vodka soda with lime, just to see how they respond. Fangio’s doing the same thing to Kelee Ringo, except it just so happens that he’s covering the 2024 Triple Crown winner.

One of the biggest takeaways of the Eagles' first preseason game is that Adoree’ Jackson and Ringo failed the stress test of covering Ja’Marr Chase. It was always going to be a near-impossible, but Ringo had trouble with leverage, covering, and tackling... which is pretty much everything.

That was very apparent on one specific play, where Vic Fangio called a cover zero. Ringo gave Chase a whole lot of cushion (deservedly), and when Chase got the ball, Ringo took a bad angle and was beaten inside. 

It looked really bad, but Vic Fangio said that was on purpose:

“There’s a lot of times in the preseason where you’re calling stuff for the purpose of evaluation, whereas, during the season…you’re calling stuff to stop [offenses].”

There was a follow-up question about that evaluation process and whether it's to see if guys can play specific types of coverages. Fangio said:

"Yeah, and also to stress them, you know, to put them in stressful situations which are going to happen during the season in games… We played Cincinnati last year, and there was no cover zero because of Chase and their receivers, and their quarterback. But it’s a good evaluation.”

As for Jackson and Ringo’s performances, Fangio said,“Obviously they had some tough assignments in that game… but I think it’s a great learning experience for both of them, and hopefully they’ll both come back… Kelee had more balls thrown at him than Adoree’ did, but I think it’s great that happened and we’ll see how much they can grow from that.”