The Eagles’ decision to release Darius Slay on Monday should be neither surprising nor alarming. Slay’s career arc and contract suggested that this move was likely, even a formality, and no one should panic about it.
Those circumstances have nothing to do with the quality of his performance over his five years with the Eagles and, in particular, his performance this past season. For a guy who could come off as a scatterbrained big mouth sometimes, who didn’t like people referring to him by his first name in part because he thought his last name sounded better, who passed out cups of his wife’s banana pudding to teammates, Slay was well respected, a leader within the locker room and especially among the defensive backs. The Eagles will miss him. The question is how much.
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Slay was scheduled to have a salary-cap hit this year of $13.8 million, according to online database Over The Cap. By releasing him (and by designating him as a post-June 1 release), the Eagles will instead absorb a cap hit of $9.4 million. So assuming they don’t re-sign him, they’ll save a little more than $4 million against the cap. Will they re-sign him? Anything is possible, and Slay said on a podcast last month that he would be open to returning to either the Eagles or his other former team, the Detroit Lions, for one more year.
Bringing Slay back, even in a reduced role for reduced money, would not be without risk for the Eagles. He turned 34 on Jan. 1, and though he was excellent in 2024 — opposing quarterbacks completed fewer than 50% of their passes to receivers he was covering — a cornerback’s decline from age can be quick and steep. The Eagles were damaged by a similar development in 2023. After James Bradberry had a terrific 2022 season for them, they signed him to a three-year extension that would have been worth as much as $38 million, only to have Bradberry’s play fall off badly.
Slay’s play hasn’t fallen off yet, but under Jeffrey Lurie’s ownership and Howie Roseman’s oversight of the roster, the Eagles aren’t in the habit of being reactive. Their philosophy of proaction — of calibrating which players are improving, which players are regressing or are likely to, and what the NFL’s economic situation will look like — has helped them win two Super Bowls and three NFC championships over the last eight years. In this case, they can afford to keep their options open when it comes to Slay and the entire cornerback position for a simple reason: Roseman and his talent-evaluation staff, through their decisions in the last two NFL drafts, have made defensive back one of the Eagles’ greatest strengths.
It wasn’t always this way. For a long time, the notion that the Eagles could bid farewell to a veteran cornerback such as Slay and feel confident that they could draft his replacement or might already have his replacement on the roster would have been a dicey proposition.
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After drafting Lito Sheppard and Sheldon Brown in 2002, the Eagles were often forced to spend significant free-agent dollars or trade resources to make sure they had at least decent corners and safeties, and sometimes their choices turned out to be not so decent. Asante Samuel and Slay were terrific. Byron Maxwell and Bradley Fletcher, as just two examples, were not. Sidney Jones and Rasul Douglas were better after they left Philadelphia than they were while they were here, and the Eagles’ struggles in drafting corners who had any staying power at all perpetuated the cycle.
That cycle spun until 2023. Roseman and his scouts got Sydney Brown in the third round and Kelee Ringo in the fourth, then hit the mother lode last year with Quinyon Mitchell in the first round and Cooper DeJean in the second. A month ago, a few days before the Eagles’ victory in Super Bowl LIX, Christian Parker, their defensive backs coach, said that Mitchell has the talent and makeup to reach the same level of play as Hall of Fame corner Darrelle Revis.
“He’s a very intelligent guy, and he’s very aware of himself and the things around him,” Parker said. “He really absorbed what we were trying to get done pretty quickly when he walked into the building. That was the first step. The second is he’s insulated with veterans around him, so he has the confidence to put those things into practice, whether it’s technical leverage or eye-placement progression or whatever it might be. Some young guys don’t understand how important those small things are.”
Mitchell does. Darius Slay helped him understand them. Three Pro Bowls with the team, a Super Bowl ring, a mentor to a budding star: The Eagles got everything they could have asked for from a man with one name. They should be able to take it from here.
