Jason Kelce’s return next season is nothing but a good thing for the Eagles | Mike Sielski

Jason Kelce has never hidden how much the decision to continue playing for the Eagles, to continue administering to himself the punishment of playing pro football, has weighed on him. The question has come up at the end of each of his last three seasons; Super Bowl LII, in February 2018, was the last time that Kelce didn’t offer that he was contemplating retirement and that no one thought to ask him about it. He has spent 10 years in the NFL, has been a first-team All-Pro three times, has been selected to four Pro Bowls, is among the greatest of all Eagles, and might yet earn induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. If he wanted to walk away, no one would begrudge him.

But this time, there was, or should have been, a little less suspense. Kelce and the Eagles announced Friday that the team had restructured his contract and that he would return for the 2021 season, and even though Kelce is 33 and the Eagles are rebuilding – in as much as any NFL team can or has to “rebuild” – any other outcome here would have been detrimental to the Eagles and surprising from Kelce.

“I’ve always said I’m playing until I’m not,” he said in a statement released through the team’s website, “and I still have a very strong desire to play the game of football. I still want to do it. I still want to be around the guys. I want to be around the building, around the coaches. I still enjoy that aspect of it, and I’m not ready to stop doing it yet. I’m excited with a lot of the energy going around right now and, also, I didn’t want to end my career on a season like we had last year. It wouldn’t feel right. I want to leave the Eagles knowing that I left it in good hands.”

There’s no way for him to know such a thing now, with respect to himself or to the team as a whole. Kelce is still an excellent center, so keeping him makes sense, especially since the Eagles don’t have a viable option to replace him. What they do have is a new head coach in Nick Sirianni, an uncertain situation at quarterback after trading Carson Wentz not long ago, and an offseason’s worth of subtractions and additions and tweaks to make to their roster. They were 4-11-1 last season, and while they probably won’t be much better in 2021, it’ll be hard for them to be much worse.

Their awful 2020 was the giveaway that Kelce would be back, actually. The first clue that he wasn’t going to retire was his mid-December monologue during a Zoom conference, when he was asked for a veteran’s perspective on whether a struggling team ought to give its younger players more of an opportunity, so that the coaches and front office could evaluate them.

“At all times in the NFL, the focus should be on winning the football game,” he said. “Nothing else takes precedence: no player evaluation, no amount of curiosity from anybody within the organization. Everything is focused, in my opinion, in this league upon winning games. You see a lot of losing teams sustain losses for a number of years when they have bad cultures. They have cultures where you don’t try and win every week. …

“This isn’t basketball. One draft pick isn’t going to make us a Super Bowl champion. It might be a big start to a Super Bowl championship, but it’s always going to be about the team. That’s the greatest thing about this sport. And culture – and the way guys fight and the way guys prepare and the way guys go about their business – is a huge reason for success in this league and in this sport. So nothing takes precedence over trying to win a football game.”

» READ MORE: Howie Roseman starts the Eagles’ salary cap work by restructuring deals for Darius Slay and Jason Kelce

Kelce made clear just how deeply he held that belief when, during the Eagles’ season finale against Washington, he questioned Doug Pederson’s decision to yank Jalen Hurts and insert Nate Sudfeld at quarterback. The notion that Kelce would allow that game to be the last of his career always seemed far-fetched at best. A guy who had given so much to the franchise wouldn’t want so sour a taste to linger so long.

In fact, his reaction to that controversy is exactly why it’s good for the Eagles to have him – and Brandon Graham and Lane Johnson, respected, experienced players – return next season. Kelce is right: The NFL and the NBA are not the same when it comes to a team’s ability to rebuild or reshape itself. Because of the short length of an average football player’s career, there’s much more annual roster turnover in the NFL than in the NBA, which means, generally speaking, a team can rise or fall off more quickly in the NFL than in the NBA.

If it’s possible to maintain some of those intangible bridges in the organization and the locker room, if it’s possible to maintain ties to older players who are still reasonably productive and who encourage and foster the right culture, an NFL team should, because everything can go bad fast. The challenge is ensuring that it doesn’t stay bad, and it will be a difficult one for the Eagles, especially on the day that Jason Kelce makes a different decision.