Jihaad Campbell’s second season with the Eagles comes with positional clarity and a clear role. What’s next?
Now healthy and with a more assured role, the former first-rounder looks poised to take a leap in his second year as an Eagle.
A second consecutive offseason shoulder surgery forced Jihaad Campbell to miss most of the on-field portion of the Eagles’ spring program. Campbell’s time away from football during chunks of this offseason was somewhat forced, but also intentional, the 22-year-old linebacker said Thursday.
College football at Alabama bled into the pre-draft process. Then came his left shoulder surgery following the scouting combine, an injury that likely caused him to slip a little bit in the draft before the Eagles traded up a spot to pick him at No. 31 last year.
Then came that rehabilitation process, rookie minicamp, gearing up for his first NFL season, his first NFL training camp, and a rookie season that saw him filling in as a starter for the recovering Nakobe Dean, taking snaps as an edge rusher when the Eagles were banged up, and eventually finishing the season as a backup.
Campbell, a South Jersey native, said he spent some time during the offseason and after his right shoulder surgery — which he called “a little fix-up thing” — doing some “spiritual grounding” and “self-critiquing” in an effort to “double down on myself and understand how I can be the best version of myself.”
He’s now two practices into his second NFL training camp. He should feel more comfortable now, more secure in his role, than he did one year ago, considering there is little doubt whether he is the starter or not. He will line up next to Zack Baun, and he does not have a Nakobe Dean-like player looking over his shoulder, working his way back from an injury to take snaps away.
Campbell’s own ailments, he hopes, are in the rearview.
He showed up to camp this week a little bigger than he had been. Baun noticed. Campbell said he put an emphasis on getting stronger as he recovered from surgery. Baun said Wednesday, after the first practice of camp, that he can see Campbell’s growth not just in his body, but in the meeting rooms, where Campbell has a better understanding of the defense, having played in it last year at multiple positions.
“I’m just glad he’s working hard and knows he’s still got some room for improvement,” Baun said.
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Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said Thursday, though, that Campbell playing a few games primarily on the edge stunted his development at inside linebacker last season. The days of Campbell cross-training on the edge are over. He may blitz some, sure, but he’s an inside linebacker.
Asked if he agreed with Fangio’s assessment of last season, Campbell said: “Whatever Vic says, right? He’s the big dog. I believe in Coach Fangio, his process, his understanding of how he actually wants things to look like for his defense.”
Fangio’s defense is being stressed a little more in camp so far. The Eagles have a new offense under first-year coordinator Sean Mannion, and they’re implementing a new scheme, one that the Eagles typically have only seen against select opponents in the past. Baun said playing linebacker against an offense that runs from under center and utilizes more play action and wide-zone blocking in the running game requires “good eyes.”
Practicing against this type of offense should help the Eagles prepare for some of their opponents. The Eagles play principles of the Sean McVay-Kyle Shanahan scheme, and their schedule includes matchups against offensive coaches that hang from branches of that tree (Arizona, Houston, Jacksonville, Seattle).
Campbell said he feels more comfortable in his second season, even against a new offense, dissecting formations and understanding what an offense is running and what it’s trying to do.
Campbell wasn’t playing poorly when Dean — who now is with the Las Vegas Raiders — supplanted him as the starter last season. He forced a fumble in his first NFL game, had an interception in Week 4 in Tampa, piled up a season-high 11 tackles in Week 5 vs. Denver, had solid reps in coverage, and, later in the season, while filling in for Dean in Buffalo in Week 17, showed his speed when he raced past multiple players to recover a Josh Allen fumble.
He finished the season with 80 tackles in 17 games (10 starts). Pro Football Focus grades are far from gospel, but Campbell was the sixth-ranked off-ball linebacker through eight games before Dean took over, and he finished the season graded 14th overall among players at his position.
The offseason then featured another surgery, clarity on his role when Dean left in free agency, and a return to the No. 11, a number he wore in high school and college.
What’s next?
“When you’re a young linebacker, you want to improve on so many things,” Campbell said. “You want to grasp information from a lot of different things, a lot of greats, kind of steal their game, watch film. That’s what I’ve been doing during the offseason.”
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