Eagles' Nolan Carroll working his way into a corner

EAGLES DEFENSIVE coordinator Bill Davis said yesterday he was excited about Nolan Carroll, who has emerged as the top candidate to start at cornerback opposite Byron Maxwell.

And yet, somehow, Davis wasn't all that excited about Carroll during 2014's late-season's death spiral, when the play of starting corners Bradley Fletcher and Cary Williams helped knock the Birds out of playoff contention. Davis' unit finished 31st against the pass and allowed the most big plays in the NFL.

If Carroll is such a strong starting option in 2015, why was he limited to a dime role last season, even as Davis' secondary collapsed in a charred, smoldering heap?

"As we went along, I didn't get him in there enough, and I probably should have," Davis said, after noting that Carroll worked through a hamstring issue last summer, in his first Eagles training camp. "That's on me. But we've got all the confidence in Nolan to compete for that other starting corner spot."

Davis said that Carroll, 28, who started 26 games in four seasons with the Dolphins before coming here as a free agent, "has been a starter in the NFL, and we viewed him as a starter last year" - yet the only game Carroll started was the season finale at the Giants, after the Eagles had been eliminated from playoff consideration.

As the 2014 season slipped away, with Fletcher in obvious meltdown mode, reporters who asked about the possibility of Carroll replacing him were told that Carroll's dime work was so important, and training him for it had taken so long, the team didn't want to mess with the setup.

"I've got this beautiful view of hindsight right now, that when you're in the middle of it, you don't quite have it," Davis said yesterday. He said he came to believe he "maybe overanalyzed it."

As you might imagine, this was just a bit frustrating for Carroll. "It seemed like every single week, we were looking at an explosive play happening on us," Carroll said yesterday.

But that frustration fueled an effort toward what Davis yesterday called "one of the best offseasons I've been around . . . I think he won maybe every competition that we had in the offseason."

Sunday, Eagles coach Chip Kelly said Carroll "set the tone for the defensive-back group" through the spring. Kelly also said that the team had a trade inquiry about Carroll, "but we weren't trading Nolan."

"I just wanted to come out here and prove to them that the guy they got last year was the guy that was supposed to play last year," Carroll said. "Coming from Miami, just playing a bunch . . . It frustrated me a lot, man, because I know what I was used to, and I know what I could have done. That feeling after the season, of really feeling like I didn't contribute as much, I felt like I had to do something different to get on the field."

Carroll said that last season, what he heard from Davis mostly was "concentrate on the dime stuff."

"That's what he told me to do, and that's what I was doing . . . I thought that was a role that, the more I learned about it, the more it was going to expand . . . I didn't go up to him and say 'you should play me more here, you should do this and that.' The role they gave me is what I concentrated on."

This spring, Kelly and Davis gave lip service to the idea of letting undersized nickel corner Brandon Boykin compete with Carroll for the open starting job, but now that Boykin has been traded to Pittsburgh, Carroll's main competition seems to be second-round rookie Eric Rowe, from Utah. Good NFL teams rarely start rookie corners, though Davis and Carroll indicated Carroll might retain his dime spot, which presumably would then give Rowe some game reps outside, at least, when Carroll moves.

When the Eagles drafted Rowe, much was made of the fact that he played both safety and corner in college, but Davis and Kelly have said he will work outside exclusively for now.

"I can have my mind set on one scheme, one technique, one play instead of trying to do multiple things at once," Rowe said yesterday.

Rowe said he watches Carroll and the other veterans intently.

"With Nolan's game, it's just like very precise. He's very detailed. I'm just trying to get on his level right now," Rowe said.

Another factor in Carroll's rising fortunes might be the change in secondary coaching from John Lovett, now at Cal, to Cory Undlin, formerly of the Broncos. "Detail-oriented" is how Carroll describes Undlin.

"He's a cool guy, man. He's intense. He's always on top of you," Carroll said. "He's always going to make sure that you're not complacent. He's always going to make sure that you're not lackadaisical. He's always going to make sure that you know what you're doing - even what the safeties are doing . . . so that you can all be on the same page.

"Every single day he comes in with an energy that I've never had before, from a defensive back coach."

Carroll said Undlin teaches a different approach to press coverage than what Carroll learned with the Dolphins - he wants the first step to be lateral, into the receiver's path, rather than backward.

"He wants us to be at the line and not give any space," Carroll said. "Be lateral with it. When they move, we move."

Davis said Undlin has brought a heightened emphasis there.

"We're just spending more time on the press technique and how we can get better at it than we were a year ago," Davis said. "That was one of our big flaws, our press technique wasn't where it needed to be."

Lovett paid for that problem, and others, with his job. Many fans wouldn't have minded seeing Davis go with him.

"You have to make those hard decisions, and hopefully most of them work out and you still have your job," Davis said, in talking about not starting Carroll last year. "And if too many don't work out, then you don't. That's life in the NFL."

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