Brian Dawkins wants Cooper DeJean and Quinyon Mitchell to ‘fall back in love with the pain of the grind’

The Eagles’ two young stars in the secondary, Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean, started their careers about as well as possible — with a win in Super Bowl LIX.

Now that two of the newest Birds have become quick fan favorites, they’ve also had a pretty exciting offseason. Mitchell had an … interesting experience at the Super Bowl parade. DeJean, who has seemingly been everywhere, started a podcast with fellow “Exciting White” Reed Blankenship — appropriately called Exciting Mics — and had Mitchell as one of their first guests. They’ve hosted charity softball games, partied down the Shore, been honored by their hometowns, and appeared at Eagles offseason events.

But with the Eagles just wrapping up OTAs and minicamp, and training camp still more than a month away, the duo is starting the season in a whole new place. DeJean and Mitchell have gone from rookies to veterans, and from nobodies to fan favorites. No one knows more about playing in Philadelphia as a fan favorite than Hall of Fame safety Brian Dawkins, who said if he could give the young players advice, it would be to fall back in love with the grind.

“You have to have put the Super Bowl in your past,” Dawkins said. “It is in the past. You won it, congratulations, but at this point where you are right now, already into OTAs, you have to have put that behind you, and you have to fall back in love with the pain of the grind, the pain of being honest with what you see on film.”

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From the start, the film has been good for the two second-year members of the Eagles secondary. Both were defensive rookie of the year candidates playing on the best defense in football — and making major contributions all the way through the postseason, capped by DeJean’s iconic pick-six in Super Bowl LIX.

Dawkins had the opposite problem. Like DeJean, Dawkins was a second-round pick, but he said when he started out, he didn’t have the self-confidence that he sees in the two young defensive backs.

» READ MORE: Quinyon Mitchell reflects on rookie season, facing Eagles wideouts in practice, and more on ‘Exciting Mics’

“Even though I had some success, I didn’t necessarily believe in myself,” Dawkins said. “I had to believe in someone else’s opinion of me before I could come up with my own opinion of myself. … I’m brutally honest with myself, sometimes too brutally honest with myself. Sometimes I wouldn’t give myself credit. I was the other way, I had to be told to chill out a little bit, because I was being too hard on myself.”

So, how will Mitchell and DeJean follow up their impressive rookie campaigns in Year 2? We’ll find out in a little less than three months.