The Money Was Never the Question: Carter and a Defense Bullying Its Own Offense

You pay a man $38 million a year, and the fair question from every working family in South Jersey is a simple one: what did we just buy?

Three practices into Eagles training camp, we’re getting the answer, and it’s the kind of answer that makes you sit up. Jalen Carter — now the highest-paid defensive tackle in the history of professional football — reported to camp and immediately started making Jalen Hurts’s life miserable. Not the offense’s life. Hurts’s life. There is a difference, and if you’ve watched enough football in this town you know exactly what I mean.

Defense 7, Offense 3

Through the early sessions, the defense has been the story, and it hasn’t been close. In a competitive situational period late in one practice, the defense won seven of the ten reps run. That’s not a bad day for the quarterback. That’s a defensive line imposing its will on a Super Bowl-caliber offense in front of its own coaches.

Carter is the headline, and he’s earned it. Instead of getting comfortable after a contract that resets the market for interior defensive linemen leaguewide, he’s lined up next to Jordan Davis and Moro Ojomo and turned the middle of the Eagles’ front into something close to a wall. When those three are consistently disruptive on the interior, everything the defense wants to do gets easier. The edge rushers get cleaner lanes. The linebackers get to run downhill. The secondary gets an extra half-second. That’s the whole idea.

South Jersey didn’t sign up for a good defensive tackle. This region signed up for the best one — and three days in, the best one is playing like it.Samuel Banks

A room, not a one-man show

And that edge has a new name worth learning: Jalyx Hunt has been, in the plainest terms, awesome so far this camp. He’s flashing off the edge in a way that suggests the Eagles’ pass rush isn’t a one-man show riding Carter’s paycheck. It’s a room. A deep one.

There’s a human story tucked inside the depth chart, too, and it belongs to Jeremiah Trotter Jr. With Jihaad Campbell out, Trotter got the nod at starting linebacker and made his presence felt — reading routes, jumping the short-to-intermediate passing game, disrupting the timing Hurts lives on. Watching a Trotter patrol the middle of an Eagles defense is the kind of thing that connects one generation of South Jersey fans to the next.

The pads come on this week. Monday’s session got moved indoors with heavy rain rolling through, but the Birds go Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before a closed walkthrough Thursday. That’s the stretch that matters. Shorts-and-shells dominance is nice. Dominance with the pads on, when the big men are allowed to actually hit somebody, is when we’ll know what this defense really is.

Here’s what I’ll say for now. The money was never the question. The question was whether the man would show up hungry after the bank cleared. He showed up hungry. The offense has the bruises to prove it.

Based on reporting from PhillyVoice, Bleeding Green Nation, NBC Sports Philadelphia, and ESPN.