PHILADELPHIA — Jason Kelce didn’t know yet. He was shoving clothes into a duffle bag and handing the bag to an equipment manager inside State Farm Stadium in Glendale, the Eagles’ loss in Super Bowl LVII no more than 90 minutes old. He was one of the last players left in the locker room, as expected. It had been a fun and taxing week for him — his brother, his mother, his father, the interviews, the attention, the stakes. Now it was time for him to answer the question that he answers at the end of every season, a tradition, like fireworks or caroling or candied yams.
He had just finished your 12th NFL season. Was this the end of his playing career?
“It can be. It could be,” he said. “It could have been the end for a couple of years now.”
What factors would he take into consideration to help him make his decision?
“One, you can still do it at a high level,” he said. “Two, whether you want to do it. That’s the big thing. It’s a grind, and I know that I can still probably come back and play at a high level, a good level. And there’s going to be a lot of things going on this offseason. I don’t know how that’s all going to transpire. So we’ll see what the options are and approach it. At the end of a season is not the time to make a decision, for me at least, about next year. I’m exhausted and emotional, and it’s getting harder every year.”
Not so hard that he will retire. Not yet. It took Kelce just about a month to decide that he wasn’t ready to walk away. So he shared a celebratory tequila toast with Howie Roseman in Indianapolis at the NFL combine, and that shot, plus the reported $14.25 million that the Eagles will pay him next season, surely helped him wash down whatever doubts and hesitation he had about continuing to play. Does the money matter? Of course the money matters. This is pro sports. The money always matters, and Kelce will again be the league’s highest-paid center.
Clearly, though, there’s something else that, like a tractor beam, keeps drawing him back to the sport, that keeps him willing to put up with such ungodly punishment to his body and mind. He isn’t Michael Corleone tearing his hair out in the kitchen, bemoaning that, every time he thinks he’s out, someone or something pulls him back in. Kelce is 35 and a husband and a father of three. As the last several years have demonstrated, he could have a long and lucrative career as a podcaster or talk-radio host tomorrow if he wanted. And he doesn’t want to. Not yet.
I can’t help but be fascinated by that, by Kelce’s pattern of waiting until the end of each season to make up his mind about playing … and choosing to play every time. And here’s the thing: Maybe it’s naive. Maybe it’s a little too Ted Lasso-y. But with Kelce, it’s more than the money. It has to be. This is a guy who, as he said in those moments just after the Super Bowl, can’t stand up to address his teammates — and he stands up to address his teammates often — without breaking down and crying. This is a guy who — after every season for the last five years, every season since the Eagles won Super Bowl LII — has admitted that he thinks about retiring, has stepped right up to the edge, and has stepped back. It started in January 2019, in the Superdome, after the Eagles lost to the Saints in the NFC divisional round.
“The competitor in you, the player, the teammate — that guy would keep playing forever,” Kelce said then.
He can’t play forever. He won’t. No one can. No one will. He knew that much even in the locker room that night early last month in Arizona, when the Eagles made a few too many mistakes against the Chiefs and cost themselves, and cost him, a second championship ring. He knew that the grains have been slipping through the hourglass for a while now, and even if he did what he ended up doing, even if he came back, it would be that much harder to justify it to himself.
“I’m not the player I used to be …” he said, “It’s only going to go the other way, and hopefully you can be accountable to your teammates and perform at that level and mentally have the energy that can make me the difference-maker that I feel I am.”
One more season, then. That was his decision, and the Eagles and their fans celebrated it. They should make certain to savor it, too. No one should savor it more than the man who made it.
