Having to work with Matt Patricia again could have been awkward for the Philadelphia Eagles‘ Darius Slay, who once said he “lost all respect” for his former head coach with the Detroit Lions.
However, Slay told the Detroit Free Press on Monday that he and Patricia have been “cordial” now that they are again working for the same organization.
“It’s another day at the office,” Slay told the newspaper while at Calvin Johnson’s charity golf tournament in Michigan. “We both got the same goal, just going out there to compete and win a championship, so that’s the main focus.”
The Lions traded Slay to the Eagles in March 2020, before what would be Patricia’s third and final season as the team’s coach. After he was traded, Slay discussed how his relationship with Patricia had soured.
Slay said in 2020 that the fallout happened from two instances in 2018, Patricia’s first season as the Lions’ coach. The first was a one-on-one meeting where Patricia told him he wasn’t “elite.”
“I’m like, ‘Huh?’ I said, ‘Huh.’ I’m trying to see where he’s coming at. He said I wasn’t an elite corner and that I’m not in their category. I was coming off an All-Pro year, eight picks,” Slay said. “That told me right there that he didn’t have no respect for me. He told me I was a good player, but then to tell me what I’m not, so I said, OK. I just took that to the chin and said, ‘OK, that’s cool.’
“Then I bounced back to two back-to-back Pro Bowlers on him. Let him know how elite I was.”
The second instance, which occurred during a team meeting after a training camp practice, is where Slay said he lost all respect for Patricia. After the practice, Slay posted a picture on social media about him and a receiver (who he declined to name) who caught some passes on him. Patricia, according to Slay, put the picture along with a small highlight tape of said player on the board and essentially told him to stop kissing up to another player, although the coach used a more profane analogy.
“Yeah. Right there, after that, that’s when all my respect went out the door for him. As a man,” Slay said.
Two other players in the room, who asked to remain anonymous, corroborated Slay’s version of events to ESPN’s Michael Rothstein in 2020. Patricia, in a statement to Rothstein in 2020, declined to go into detail.
The Eagles hired Patricia as a senior defensive analyst in April. Slay will be entering his fourth season with the Eagles in 2023 and has been selected to the Pro Bowl in each of the past two seasons.
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