Brian Dawkins didn't know Jim Johnson had cancer until we did. According to Eagles' athletic trainer Rick Burkholder no one did. At the super bowl, Dawk talked about his defensive coordinator.

"He expects so much of us - you really couldn't 'mike' him during the game, a long string of 'beeps' the whole time, but that's just him, and we know that, because he expects us to get everything right the first time. He pushes us that way. Every guy on the defensive side of the ball respects him, to the utmost . . . He's just one of those, obviously, old-school guys. He'll let you have it. If he watches the film and finds out he may have been wrong, he'll come back and apologize. In the moment, he's just so juiced and so fired up, I think sometimes his emotions get the best of him," Dawkins said.

In that same article, Les Bowen mentioned that several teams asked to speak with secondary coach Sean McDermott but McDermott did not go on any interviews. The longtime Johnson assistant is expected to be the guy to take on more repsonsibilty if/when Johnson is unavailable. If in fact JJ were unable to return next year, I think McDermott will most likely be promoted to defensive coordinator. Dawkins agrees.

"That would be my sense of it," he said. "Obviously, they haven't talked to me about any of those things - I'm kind of on the outside looking in right now, not really in the fold completely. But I would think that Sean would be the guy that would step up in rank."