DeSean Jackson Talks ‘Go Deep’ Doc, Delaware State, Eagles & More with Rich

DeSean Jackson played 15 years in the NFL, and watching them back in documentary form still gets to him.

"It's emotional, honestly," Jackson told Rich in studio. His new documentary, Go Deep: The DeSean Jackson Story, streams exclusively on Prime Video starting Thursday, September 24th, and much of the footage was shot by his brother, who has been training a camera on him since he was a kid and was still filming during the interview. The hardest part to watch is his father. "I lost him after my first year in the NFL. So, looking back at the footage, it always just gets me real emotional, cuz I just know how hard we worked to get to where I was able to make it."

One of the voices in the film is unmistakable. Jim Brown built a relationship with Jackson when Jackson was a teenager in Los Angeles hanging around the wrong people. Jackson's father called Brown, who was doing gang intervention work, and Brown invited Jackson to his house and was blunt. "He said, man, there's only two places you're going to end up. You either end up dead or in jail."

It sank in, Jackson said, but not all at once. Growing up around drug abuse and violence, the people he thought were his friends didn't always have his best interests in mind, and he didn't know how to separate himself from them. That lasted longer than most people would guess. Jackson said he didn't fully unhook from that world until about his seventh or eighth season in the league.

The turning point was 2013, when Chip Kelly released him from the Eagles. Jackson stressed that he never got in trouble and was never arrested, but people around him had encounters with the law, some fighting murder cases, and he didn't know how to turn his back on friends he had known since childhood. Getting released was an eye-opener. "Maybe I shouldn't have showed the Instagram posts or people hanging out and doing certain things. It was just too much information I feel like I was showing."

Rich also asked about the knock at the time that Jackson didn't know Kelly's full playbook. Jackson said there was something to it. In Kelly's offense, a play called to the right could be flipped to the left, which meant learning two different positions, something he had never had to do before. "I think it played a part in some things I didn't know, and I had to study extra."

The documentary also revisits his draft slide. Jackson was projected anywhere from 15th to the end of the first round, and no wide receivers went in the first round that year. He knew he was smaller and lighter, but he believes the labels hurt most: not a team player, selfish, didn't work as hard as he could, and a father who was a problem. Jackson said talk about his dad got back from his college coach at Cal, Jeff Tedford, to Andy Reid, and his father and Tedford had a bad relationship by the end, though Jackson and Tedford have since moved past it.

What he heard right after being told he was drafted still stings. "I don't want to have to deal with your dad. That was hurtful."

Reid became something else entirely. "Coach Reid was a father figure to me," Jackson said. Reid is from California and understood the pull Jackson felt from home, but insisted that on the football field, the focus was football. When Jackson's father died, Reid was the one he could talk to. "When I lost my dad, it was like me losing my backbone," Jackson said. "I didn't have that voice to straighten me back from when I wanted to go do the knucklehead stuff."

Asked for the best quarterback he ever played with, Jackson said Donovan McNabb is up there, but Michael Vick is his all-time favorite. That brought back the first play of a game against Washington. LaRon Landry had been talking before the game, telling Jackson he was going to hit him so hard he would kill him. Jackson went to the locker room and asked for a bomb on the first play, a call that wasn't in the plan. He got it, and he had plenty to say to Landry afterward. What set Vick apart, Jackson said, was touch. "He threw it so far, but he never overthrew me."

Then came the moment Giants fans still can't forgive. Jackson walked Rich through the Miracle at the Meadowlands, starting with visualization. He used to close his eyes the night before games and picture himself scoring.

He had just come from an interview with Victor Cruz, who was on that Giants team, and Cruz told him he had been standing about 10 feet from Tom Coughlin, whose message was "do not, whatever you do, do not kick this ball to him." Jackson himself was stunned when Matt Dodge's punt came his way. "There's nothing in life you could have told me he was going to kick it to me." He had been antagonizing the Giants, pumping them up, trying to trick them, and the punt came off like a line drive, as if Dodge tried so hard to kick it out of bounds that it shanked straight to him.

Jackson fumbled the catch, and he still insists it was on purpose. When the ball bounced two or three yards to his right, the coverage team shifted out of their lanes, and he stuck his foot in the ground and went. He also sees something bigger in it, since his father passed away about a year and a half later. "I just feel like he grabbed me on wings and guided me to the end zone."

So how is he received in New York? "Oh, they can't stand me," Jackson said. It's the Giants and the Cowboys. That year, he said, the Giants thought they were headed back to the playoffs, and the Eagles shattered that.

TJ, a die-hard Cowboys fan, confirmed the Dallas half. When Jackson played for Philadelphia or Washington, "if the man would only have two catches a game against us, they would be two probably 75-80 yard bombs." Jackson added his personal best against Dallas: four catches for 210 yards.

He believes Washington fans give him a pass, because after Kelly released him, he signed with Washington and tormented the Eagles, estimating more than 1,400 yards against them in a handful of games. He admitted he was talking on the sideline every time he saw Kelly. "I was so mad at that dude. But you live and you learn."

Jackson's move into coaching came almost by accident. After retiring following the 2022-23 season, he spent a full year doing nothing but taking his kids to school. Then he got off the couch to coach high school football for Travis Clark, now his assistant head coach and defensive coordinator at Delaware State. He fell in love with it within a week, watching starstruck players respond to what he poured into them, and that team reached its first championship game in over 100 years before losing.

Two weeks later, Delaware State called about a head coaching job. Jackson turned it down two or three times. "I played 15 years not to retire to go be in the facility for 12 to 15 hours a day."

Then he called Andy Reid, Sean McVay and Deion Sanders to ask what kind of head coach they thought he would be. All three were positive, and all three spoke to the athletic director and university president on his behalf, since he had no coaching experience. "They all basically gave me nothing but flowers."

Rich loved the Sanders part, remembering working with him at NFL Network, where Sanders would scream "Cut him!" at the screen whenever a player made a bonehead move. Now Sanders, Marshall Faulk, Eddie George and Jackson are all coaching.

Jackson doesn't accept the idea that former players are skipping the line. His argument is about relating. Coaches who never played don't know what it's like to take a hit, he said, and some things have nothing to do with X's and O's. A player might have just received a phone call about trouble at home, and a coach who can read that knows not to yell at him that day.

He also said this isn't about sending players to the NFL. "If I can help these kids be fathers, sons, walk across the stage and get a degree, I mean, that's bigger than anything in life, I think."

Rich asked what his dad would say hearing that. Jackson believes he would be proud. What gives him a soft spot is that his kids never got to meet his father, who was a lover and took in so many kids without fathers. It's why Jackson finds it hard to say no to people.

The voice he hears in himself as a coach is his own. He tells players not to do things he did, and he is honest about it. "Maybe if I would have just listened a little more, or maybe if I would have worked a little harder in working out or lifting weights. You can't go back in time, but you can tell the youth."

Before he left, Rich asked him to pick the NFC East. Jackson admitted it's hard, but he can't go against his Eagles, even after losing A.J. Brown. He defended Jalen Hurts as a proven winner, and Chris looked up the numbers on the spot: Dak Prescott wins 59% of his starts, Hurts 69%. Jackson said if anyone other than Philadelphia wins, it would be the Cowboys, but he can't say it. "I bleed green. If you were to cut me right now, you're going to see green coming out of my veins."

He did agree that McVay seems to have the best team in football. With Myles Garrett and Aaron Donald on the same line, "how are you going to block that?"

The interview ended with a challenge. Jackson wanted to race Rich in the 40, and Rich countered that he runs a 30 while Jackson runs a 40. They agreed to do it next year for charity.