Cox kicks up his heels over his first sack of the season for Eagles

THE SACK DANCE Fletcher Cox broke into after enveloping Cam Newton Monday night was the "NaeNae," as some fans correctly observed on Twitter.

Cox said yesterday he hadn't put a lot of thought into what he was going to do after he finally got a sack this season - the dance popularized by We Are Toonz was just the first thing that came to mind - but he certainly had thought about how finally bringing down a quarterback would feel.

"Only the people on the sideline know how I felt, to finally get my first sack after being right there, being close every time," said Cox, who gets credit from his teammates and coaches as a key disruptive force, but doesn't have the kind of stats that will elevate him to the Pro Bowl.

Outside linebacker Connor Barwin does have those stats, sitting tied for second in the NFL with 10 1/2 sacks, but Barwin spent much of his time with reporters Monday night talking about Cox, and how the defensive end drove Newton into Barwin's clutches on two of Barwin's 3 1/2 sacks against the Panthers in a 45-21 Eagles victory.

"Nobody was selfish up front," Barwin said. "It was just a really unselfish performance by evrerybody up front, especially the two guys inside [often Cox and Bennie Logan] . . . Fletcher got to Cam twice before I did, and Cam kind of got away. If he doesn't do that, I'm not getting there [for the sack]."

"Fletcher, I don't know how many pressures he's got, but he's got as many as anybody on the team," Barwin said of Cox, the 12th overall pick in the 2012 draft. Pro Football Focus credited Cox with seven hurries in 30 pass rush attempts against Newton. "If anybody understands how opportunistic sacks are, it's me. I know he's been gettin' there. Hopefully, he can get hot now and start racking 'em up."

"I think 'Fletch' has done everything we've asked of him since we've been here," Eagles coach Chip Kelly said yesterday. "I think he's been a real force for us on the inside, and I think sometimes people get graded on statistics, but there are different parts of that, from a defensive standpoint. I think the pressure that he's generated both in the run and the pass game all year long has been outstanding."

Cox, Barwin and the Eagles' defense got to show off, with nine sacks, on "Monday Night Football," the stage NFL players still care about most - the game all the other players watch, as they recover from their contests.

Cox said he heard from lots of friends and former teammates, and really enjoyed a postgame group chat among former Mississippi State players.

"Last night was fun, knowing everybody was watching," Cox said. "I think communication was the biggest key for us, because we lost one of our big communicators [middle linebacker DeMeco Ryans] last week. We knew all week in practice that communication was going to be the key, that we had to echo the calls and get the job done.

"The crowd was electric, and the fans stayed with us the whole time, from start to finish. The stadium was loud . . . we just played as a complete team."

Newton did not look particularly agile, leading to repeated speculation on the "MNF" broadcast, and elsewhere, that he was injured, though Carolina coach Ron Rivera emphatically denied that, both after the game and in his day-after news conference.

"I don't think he was hurt," Cox said. "We always talk about, [with] running quarterbacks, don't get behind 'em, [don't] give'em their step-up, to be able to scramble and run around."

Cox said that as happy as he was when he finally pulled down Newton, he didn't mind that a couple of his pressures resulted in sacks for Barwin.

"I'm not that selfish teammate . . . I got a lot of one-on-one with the center last night, and I think I caused [Newton] to move around the pocket a whole lot," Cox said. "[Defensive coordinator Bill] Davis talks about it all the time - when you get one-on-ones, you gotta win, you gotta move the quarterback off the spot."

One headline from the Packers' 55-14 victory over the Bears Sunday was the move of outside linebacker Clay Matthews inside. Expect to hear a fair amount about this during the week, as the Eagles prepare to deal with one of the NFL's premier defenders.

Chip Kelly liked the way the move gave Green Bay "the ability to blitz him as an inside linebacker."

"I think sometimes if he was playing one of the ends, you could always scheme it up and run away from him," Kelly said. "Now you can't, because he's in the middle and is playing sideline to sideline.

"It's interesting that a player that's played outside his whole career, in college, and the impact he's had in this league, in 5 short days can switch around and be an inside linebacker. It kind of tells you what kind of football player Clay is."

Kelly noted that it's a tough call as to whether this was a permanent switch or just something the Packers will keep in their bag of tricks.

"It will be interesting to see how much more of that we see this week, in terms of what they're going to do going forward," Kelly said. "But it's drastically different than anything they've done all year long."

Chip Kelly said Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers might be the best in a league with several really good quarterbacks right now. "I think the last couple of weeks, he's just been on fire," Kelly said. "It's going to be a big challenge for us. I know our guys are excited about it" . . . Kelly said Chris Prosinski played less than a week after the Eagles signed him, instead of Earl Wolff, because of Prosinski's special-teams prowess . . . Casey Matthews played 30 snaps in DeMeco Ryans' place, Emmanuel Acho played 31. "I thought both those guys did a really good job," Kelly said. "Rick [Minter, the inside linebackers coach] rotates those guys . . . He's monitoring them. One thing we do, I think, again, having selfless players, is making sure a fresh body out there is better than just one guy that stays for a long time."

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