PHILADELPHIA — Nakobe Dean is in his comfort zone, which is to say it is another day among strangers. He mingles and poses for camera phones. A deejay pounds music off the walls of an auditorium inside Motivation High, a magnet program in Southwest Philadelphia. Partners of Dean’s foundation, Kind Hearts 4 Lyfe, attend to the line of people at the door. Hundreds of shopping bags cover the room’s tables and cabinets along the walls. In them: whole turkeys, boxed stuffing, jarred gravy.
It is Nov. 18. The day before, Dean, his mother, Neketta, and his team cooked meals at another charity event in Chester, the largest city in Delaware County. Dean’s foundation started pursuing food relief efforts before the government shutdown ended, and this turkey drive was a continued outreach for low-income families whose access to food stamps had been disrupted.
Dean ambles across the floor at his usual unhurried pace, so it’s difficult to judge if the linebacker is at all tired by this two-day stretch. But he authorized both events because the Philadelphia Eagles wouldn’t have any days off the week of Thanksgiving and their Friday-afternoon home game against the Chicago Bears.
“Hurt, healthy, right, wrong, indifferent — wanted to give back to the community,” Dean said.
In those five words, Dean summed up his four-year career. Service is the constant for the defensive field marshal whose health has been erratic. Sharing is the driving principle of his life, the source of his family memories. Neketta brought her children along to Saturday events as a community affairs officer in Tunica County, Miss., once the nation’s poorest county. The family held its own events when it moved to nearby Horn Lake. By holding monthly events since arriving in Philadelphia as a little-known 2022 third-round pick, Nakobe has carried out his mother’s core lesson: What you have means nothing until you share it.
“You don’t wait to get connected,” he said. “You just do it, and everything happens.”
Dean now has connections in nearly every Philadelphia neighborhood. Beyond his stable play at the center of the Eagles defense, the linebacker’s service is one of the reasons he is beloved. On Oct. 31, the NFL Players Association awarded Dean its weekly Community MVP honor after he provided dental care to more than 100 students at one school and 1,000 winter coats to another. The award merely fell within Dean’s timeline. During the summer, Dean supplied 1,000 backpacks to students in Chester and Mississippi.
Back then, Dean was still rehabbing the patellar tendon he’d torn in the 2024 wild-card round. The injury sidelined Dean during Super Bowl LIX and prompted the Eagles to draft Jihaad Campbell. As reporters and pundits wondered whether Dean would get Wally Pipp’d, Neketta made certain her son kept his mind busy. “Mental pushups,” she has long called it. And the best mental pushups, she figured, were hosting May football camps in Mississippi and Philly. She would not let Nakobe dwell on his injury or his fate thereafter.
“What I would tell him was, you know, we don’t know what God’s plan is for you,” Neketta said. “God’s got the last say-so. And I always push God, you know what I’m saying? Not God being this invisible person, like for some people, but God being helping people that you see every day. The God in you and showing love to people. I knew that if I got him busy in the community … you’re gonna see the smiles and the happiness. And it has nothing to do with football.”
Neketta grew up country, which is to say her grandmother taught her how to drive a stick-shift 1978 Ford truck when she was in the sixth grade.
“It was a clunker,” Neketta recalled.
But she was happy to be driving. And this was the country, after all. So, of course, there was a reason a child needed to drive. Neketta’s mother essentially enlisted her as their pocket of Tunica County’s trash service. She’d drive out to neighboring families, throw their trash in the pickup bed and haul it out to the dumpster a quarter of a mile outside of town.
Neketta liked her job. She also liked delivering plates of food to neighbors from their family’s Sunday dinners. Their extended family all lived in one home. Most families in Tunica did, too. The Rev. Jesse Jackson once called the region “America’s Ethiopia” due to its extreme poverty, and many homes lacked running water and electricity. Neketta said a 2,000-square-foot home would typically house 12 extensions of a family.
Food was often scarce. Neketta’s grandmother shared everything with her neighbors, including their Sunday dinners. “Take them a plate,” she’d tell Neketta. Out went the plates. Out went the trash. Neketta said her interactions with the neighbors gave her “this euphoric feeling,” a “happiness that people have just being thankful of your presence,” a thankfulness “that you’re doing something that seems so small.”
“Like, I remember Miss Elizabeth, she was an old lady in the neighborhood, and she only had one leg,” Neketta said. “So I remember my grandma saying, ‘Go down there and mop for Miss Elizabeth.’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh, mom, I don’t wanna do that.’ But then afterwards, she was so happy. And as you grow up, you see the value in just helping others. Because even when she passed away eventually, we were so sad in the community. She was a pillar of the community. So I learned early the value of taking care of elders and seeing after them.”
Nakobe spent a good portion of his childhood serving in nursing homes. In Horn Lake, Neketta, her sister, their aunt and cousin wanted to continue their family’s principle of community service. They started a tradition they called the 12 Days of Christmas. They gathered their children for acts of daily service that started on Dec. 1, and they held a family party on the last day. (Nakobe’s birthday is Dec. 13.) They bought 99-cent pairs of socks, bagged them with apples, oranges and peppermints and delivered them to nursing homes. They bought toys for kids in family shelters. They delivered meals to homeless shelters.
“My mama always just tried to make sure that we knew that we was blessed and to always be grateful,” Nakobe said.
Neketta left no other choice for Nakobe, his older brother, Nikolas, and younger sister, Brooklyn. When she took them on her Saturday work events, she pushed them through the early years of complaining about the Saturdays she’d steal from them. “I don’t care!” she’d say. But by high school, they’d bought in. They’d bring along their friends. By Nakobe’s junior year at Horn Lake High, most of their football team was helping with city cleanup days. Neketta permitted her kids “Freestyle Fridays” at the house, which was their day to host friends, eat pizza, play video games and play basketball outside.
“That was their day to look forward to,” Neketta said. “Because they know Saturday, we up and chucking it.”
Nakobe is a tinkerer, which is to say he is often considering what is possible. When Neketta had him volunteer at veterans affairs facilities as a kid, he saw wounded people with no limbs and wondered how it would be to give them legs. He discovered prosthetics and considered developing them. Neketta steered him toward an engineering degree, which could lead him to medical school if that path became possible.
“He was a math and science wiz,” Neketta said.
Nakobe knew his multiplications by first grade. And not just one times two, but 12 times 11, and so on. Neketta said it was a considerable gift given Nakobe also battled a severe speech impediment until middle school.
Neketta emphasized schooling in their family. She never let her kids get a job. Beyond volunteering, she made it clear to them, “Your job is school.” Nakobe graduated from high school with a 4.3 GPA. As a five-star linebacker, he had scholarship offers from Harvard and Stanford to go along with his letters from Georgia and Alabama. Neketta preferred Stanford. Nakobe preferred playing in the Southeastern Conference. He said he wasn’t going. She told him, “You’ve got to tell me why.” The next day, Nakobe presented his mother with a breakdown of California’s cost of living, the average plane ticket price for her and other family members to visit, and other economic factors. “You can’t afford for me to go to Stanford,” he told her.
His sly argument worked. He enrolled at Georgia and majored in mechanical engineering.
“He put the math on me,” Neketta said. “He hit me with the one-two: One plus one is two.”
Nakobe Dean with his father, Byron, and mother, Neketta, on the red carpet at the Fountains of Bellagio before the first round of the 2022 NFL Draft. (Kirby Lee / Imagn Images)
Neketta, who earned her master’s degree in social work at the University of Tennessee, was just the second in her family to attend college. Her aunt, Idamae Keys, played basketball on scholarship at Northwest Community College and Mississippi Industrial College for Women. Neketta had been the salutatorian of her high school but assumed she couldn’t afford higher education. Her underfunded high school did not advise her about financial aid, which she would have secured. So, she entered the military. She served eight years in the U.S. Army, three on active duty in the Gulf War. She’d been told the GI Bill was her only path out of poverty.
Nakobe’s grades and football pedigree afforded him more options. There was a time when Georgia briefly thought he was uninterested. Coach Kirby Smart and defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann paid a visit to the Dean house on a recruiting visit. But Nakobe had a physics project due. He had to build a small electric car out of wires and wood. Smart was trying to sell Nakobe on a program that had just won a national championship (and would win another with Nakobe at linebacker), but Nakobe kept tinkering with his car.
“He was like, ‘Can you put this down for a second?’” Nakobe said.
Schumann has laughed recalling the story when visiting with Neketta.
“He was like, ‘I couldn’t even talk because I’m staring at, like, this kid is really sitting here making a car,’” Neketta said. “‘He ain’t thinking about football.’”
Nakobe, who left Georgia a year early for the NFL, says he still intends to go back and finish his degree. He had a 3.55 GPA. Perhaps he’ll return to his interest in prosthetics. But he’s interested in opening businesses. He has a few ideas, but he kept them to himself.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Of course, it’ll be maybe post-ball.”
Nakobe’s quad twitched, which is to say his recovery had just begun.
After he tore his patellar tendon, he traveled to Los Angeles for the surgery. He stayed there for two weeks and was told that timeline was vital in getting his quad reactivated. His father, Byron, sent Nakobe’s younger brother, Bryce, to stay with him and help around the hotel. On Nakobe’s first day after surgery, a doctor hooked up a muscle-stimulating machine to his quad and asked him to squeeze as hard as he could.
“That was a real painful thing,” Dean said.
He felt like he was squeezing. But the quad muscle wasn’t responding. The next day, it jumped.
“That’s all I needed,” he said. “It was one of them things — like, you know when you’re working toward something, like, you know it’s going to happen, but you’ve got to make it happen? Yeah. I feel like most moments happen like that in life. You know something’s going to happen, but you’ve got to make it happen. We know we can get to the Super Bowl, but we’ve got to make it happen.”
Dean began the season on the PUP list. He circled Oct. 1 as his return date. He did not want to miss anything. He made an arrangement with Autumn Lockwood, an assistant strength coach, to begin his rehab work an hour and a half earlier than initially scheduled so he could attend all the team’s practices and meetings. He attended everything with the team while on PUP. Every meeting. Every practice. Every lift. Every game. It was a conscious correction from when Dean withdrew while missing 12 games with foot injuries during the 2023 season.
“I had kind of checked out,” Dean said. “This time, I didn’t check out. I had been through it before. My emotions were in check. My will was stronger. It was like I know I’m going to come out better on the other end of it, so no reason for me to sulk right now.”
After six weeks, he was allowed to remove his knee brace. He still had to pass physical tests arranged by the team, which included stretches and specific torque numbers in his jumps. He didn’t pass those tests until Week 2. After two more weeks, the Eagles opened his practice window on Oct. 1. He went a half-hour early because he wanted to be ready to go. He debuted in Philadelphia’s Oct. 9 loss to the New York Giants. The Eagles won four straight before Sunday’s loss to the Dallas Cowboys.
Dean initially split snaps at inside linebacker with Campbell, who would either sub in during alternating drives or play along the edge in base packages. But defensive coordinator Vic Fangio has preferred Dean. Dean has started in each of the last four games, and Campbell’s snaps were reduced from 34 against the Green Bay Packers to 11 against the Cowboys. Dean, an effective blitzer, has recorded a sack and tackle for loss in each of the last three games.
“Nakobe has been playing very well, and he deserves to be in there,” Fangio said.
Dean is back at the center of an Eagles defense that has revealed it can be dominant. The unit held the high-octane Packers and Detroit Lions to 16 total points. Even after Sunday’s 24-21 loss to the Cowboys, who totaled 473 yards, the Eagles are tied for sixth in the NFL in defensive EPA per play (0.06), according to TruMedia.
When the Eagles host the Bears the day after Thanksgiving, Dean will again be where he belongs.
In service of his city.