The Best Eagles Defensive Backs of All Time

Here is the fact that frames the entire conversation about Eagles defensive backs: three players are tied for the franchise interception record, all of them at exactly 34.

Brian Dawkins. Eric Allen. Bill Bradley. Three different eras, three completely different jobs, the same number. Sorting them is the whole argument.

1. Brian Dawkins

Thirteen seasons in Philadelphia, from 1996 to 2008, and the franchise record for games played at 183. Thirty-four interceptions, 26 sacks, 37 forced fumbles.

What separates Dawkins from every other defensive back in franchise history is range of impact. He was the first player in NFL history to post a sack, an interception, a fumble recovery and a touchdown reception in the same game. He played centerfield, played in the box, blitzed off the edge, and hit like a linebacker who had wandered fifteen yards downfield looking for someone to punish.

He is the standard. Everyone else on this list gets measured against him.

2. Eric Allen

Allen shares the franchise interception record at 34, and he collected them as a cornerback, which is the harder way to do it. Quarterbacks stop throwing at corners who take the ball away. He kept getting chances anyway, and he kept converting them into points.

He was the most complete cover corner the Eagles have ever had, and he did it as part of a defense that was already terrifying without him.

3. Bill Bradley

This is the name most Eagles fans under forty do not know, and that is a genuine shame.

Bradley played safety in Philadelphia from 1969 to 1976 and made three Pro Bowls. He also did something no player in the history of the National Football League had ever done: he led the entire league in interceptions in back-to-back seasons.

Eleven picks in 1971. Nine more in 1972. First player ever to lead the NFL in interceptions in consecutive years.

Those 11 interceptions in 1971 are still the Eagles single-season record. He earned first-team All-Pro honors in both seasons, and he did it on teams that were, to put it charitably, not good. Bradley was the best player on bad football teams, which is the fastest way in sports to be forgotten.

On raw ball production relative to circumstance, he has the strongest case of anyone here.

The next tier

Troy Vincent gave the Eagles years of high-level corner play and made the Pro Bowl repeatedly in Philadelphia. Asante Samuel was the best pure ball-hawk of the Andy Reid era and turned interceptions into an expectation rather than an event. Sheldon Brown was the physical, dependable half of that secondary and delivered one of the hardest legal hits the franchise has on tape. Wes Hopkins and Andre Waters made the middle of the field genuinely dangerous for anyone crossing it.

More recently, Darius Slay handled true number-one assignments in an era built to make that impossible.

The honest ranking

Dawkins is first, and this is the one part of the conversation that is not close. Nobody else combined production, versatility and sustained excellence in one uniform the way he did.

Allen and Bradley is the real debate. Allen did it at corner against better competition and on better teams. Bradley did it at a volume nobody in league history had managed before, on teams that gave him nothing.

Take Allen if you value the difficulty of the position. Take Bradley if you value what a player produced when there was no help coming. Either answer will start a fight in Philadelphia, which is exactly how it should be.