Of course the Eagles gave Carson Wentz a contract extension, and the reasons go beyond football | Mike Sielski

It doesn’t take much to find reasons that the Eagles signed Carson Wentz to a four-year contract extension, one that will reportedly guarantee him more than $107 million and that is scheduled to keep him with the team through the 2024 season.

He was on his way to being named the NFL’s most valuable player in 2017 before injuring his left knee. Over his three seasons in the league, he has thrown 2½ times more touchdown passes than interceptions. His physical skills and mental acuity are obvious to anyone who watches him play, and at his best and healthiest, he can keep the Eagles in playoff contention and, in turn, Super Bowl contention.

But you do have to look a bit deeper for all the reasons that the Eagles were so eager to sign Wentz, and one of those reasons was made manifest during a now-forgotten news conference on May 22, 2018. The Eagles were two weeks away from their scheduled visit with President Donald Trump at the White House, to commemorate their victory in Super Bowl LII. Given the sociopolitical outspokenness of several players on that team — Malcolm Jenkins, Chris Long, and Torrey Smith among them — questions were already swirling about how many members of the organization would attend. As it turned out, Trump rescinded the invitation after the Eagles arranged to send a small contingent to the event. But at the time, everyone assumed that at least a few Eagles were going.

“The details aren’t fully available yet, so I’m not sure,” Wentz said that day. “I know for me personally, if the team decides as a whole, most guys want to go and be a part of it, I will be attending with them. I think it’s just a cool way to receive the honor, kind of nationally, and be recognized. I don’t personally view it — I know some people do; everyone has their own opinion on it — I don’t view it as a political thing whatsoever. I don’t really mess with politics very often. I will be involved in going. Again, the rest of the details will be coming out soon.”

There are politicians who wish that they could handle a tricky inquiry so deftly. It wasn’t just that Wentz, without completely dodging the question, avoided offering any incendiary sound bites or alienating any of his teammates. It was that he was comfortable answering the question, or, at a minimum, appeared so. He likely knew it was coming and had been prepared for it, sure, but he never betrayed any unease with the topic. He was the franchise quarterback. This was part of his job, part of his responsibility, and he handled it as if he’d been asked whether he preferred grape jelly or strawberry preserves with his peanut butter.

These things matter. In the NFL, they matter a lot. We might forget or not care that they do, or we might pretend that they don’t. Most of us probably view a professional football franchise’s success or failure, its competency or its ineptness — its image — purely through the lens of its performance on the field. Most of us probably view a professional football player in the same way.

But the NFL is the most popular and powerful entertainment institution in the United States. It is a business, one of the biggest in the world, and its franchises want their most important and visible employees to represent them well, to say and do the right things at the right times. It’s no coincidence that, in their 690-word news release announcing Wentz’s extension, the Eagles devoted 263 of those words to Wentz’s charity work. This contract is about football, but it’s not about football alone. It’s about making sure that Wentz is the Eagles’ public face for as long as possible.

Of course the succession of injuries that Wentz has suffered since entering the league in 2016 — to his ribs, to his knee, to his back — gave the Eagles a modicum of pause, or should have. Of course he wasn’t on the field when the Eagles won their first championship since 1960. Of course he himself might never win a Super Bowl. But based on the available evidence, he certainly can, and if the Eagles continue managing and coaching their team as smartly as they have lately, the odds are good that he will. What the Eagles already know for certain is that Carson Wentz already has mastered everything else about the most demanding and scrutinized position in sports, and they don’t need to see any more to know that they could never give him any reason to walk away.