Meet Ted Rath, the Eagles’ ‘get-back guy’ who works to keep the team fresh and on the field

PHOENIX — Ted Rath patrolled the Soldier Field sidelines on a blustery Chicago afternoon in mid-December wearing a hoodie with the sleeves cut off.

The Eagles vice president of player performance’s game-day clothing choices are consistent in all elements, as is his demeanor. He’s often the first to reach fallen Eagles players in the aftermath of a play that spills into the sidelines, sprinting to the action if out of position.

He received plenty of skeptical looks from players struggling to stay warm on Dec. 18 against the Bears, but Rath said there’s a method to the hypothermia-inviting madness.

“I like this quote: ‘You find self-discovery on the other side of discomfort,’” Rath told The Inquirer on Wednesday. “For me, [I’m] trying to build in the greatest team sport there is. Yeah, in Chicago it was freezing cold. Yeah, it’s cold; it was miserable. … There’s no such thing as bad weather, just weak-minded people. They’re weaker than we are. Just trying to create that mindset.”

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Rath first gained notoriety as the Rams’ strength coach nicknamed the “Get-back guy” because of his weekly responsibilities to keep coach Sean McVay out of the path of officials on the sideline, but has become something more for the Eagles.

Along with VP of sports medicine and head athletic trainer Tom Hunkele, he’s become a major reason for the Eagles’ minimal injury report going into Super Bowl LVII. He might also be the organization’s fastest talker, a go-to for book recommendations, and the first to seek out a heavy jacket for the flight home after a below-freezing game against the Bears.

“He acted all tough on the sideline,” Eagles edge rusher Josh Sweat said, laughing. “But as soon as he got in? Man, he bundled up.”

Rath and Hunkele both joined the Eagles organization in 2020 and have made changes to help the team improve its previously shaky results preventing and managing injuries.

Shorter practices during training camp, extra rest days, and more walk-throughs are some of the obvious changes. Behind the scenes, there’s been an even greater focus on sports science and, as Rath puts it, “optimization management.”

“Workload management sometimes gets a bad rap,” Rath said. “Sports science, in general, gets a bad rap. I would love to re-term this. Optimization management. We are optimizing our players. The beauty is this, whether we have an hour-and-44-minute practice or a three-and-a-half-hour practice, I’m trying to do as much as humanly possible so that I can get our players to overreach so that we can get stronger, get better, and make our output a little bit higher the next time. Then you have to bring them down. Then you have to recover and rest.”

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From 2018-20, only two teams ranked worse than the Eagles in Football Outsiders’ adjusted games lost to injury metric, which analyzes each team’s weekly injury report to measure overall health. With Rath and Hunkele’s new approach starting in earnest with Nick Sirianni’s hiring in 2021, the Eagles finished 12th in the metric last season and head into Sunday with all 22 offensive and defensive starters from Week 1 expected to play in Arizona.

There are more factors at play with the team’s improvement than simply turning things over to Rath and Hunkele. The Eagles got slightly younger on average since the 2020 season, and general manager Howie Roseman placed some added emphasis on targeting players without extensive injury histories in the draft and free agency.

Injury prevention, Hunkele said, isn’t even how the group quantifies success.

“This is a violent sport,” Hunkele said. “There are some things that are going to happen on the field that I just can’t prevent and he can’t prevent. It doesn’t [matter] how much you train, how correctly you do everything. There’s some acute, violent injuries that occur. That’s just the nature of our game, and you accept it. If someone comes in and says, ‘I’m going to prevent injuries,’ they’re not going to prevent those injuries.”

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The injuries the Eagles have made strides in preventing or managing have been of the soft-tissue variety, an area that the team struggled with greatly a few years ago.

“We’ve always been, in my opinion, ready to go, fresh, healthy, mentally and physically,” Eagles defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon said. “That’s really a credit to those guys.”

Hunkele added, “We’ve been really successful at how we go about monitoring the workload. How we go about incorporating that into the reactionary stuff that we have to do as guys have chronic conditions or as guys age, too. What are we looking for and what are we worried about where we know we have to dial back or we can say, no, now’s the time to push.”

When players do get hurt, Rath and Hunkele handle their rehab processes as well. Both said earning players’ trust is the biggest factor in their job.

Andre Dillard spent extended time with both earlier this season while recovering from a fractured forearm suffered during training camp. A few years ago, Rath put Dillard onto author and motivational speaker David Goggins, which Dillard said was transformative.

“I got hooked on it,” Dillard said. “He put me onto him. He’s always asking me, ‘Hey, did you get the book yet? How far are you in the book?’ I think he reads fast, too, because he always finishes the book faster than me.”

Ndamukong Suh, who overlapped with Rath in Detroit, added: “He’s very open-minded. Most trainers or strength coaches care about their methods and their model of how they want to do stuff. He was open to looking at things differently, how I look at stuff from the training perspective.”

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Rath developed his conviction in sports science during a three-year stint with the Rams, one of the first teams in the league to start shortening practice times during training camp and sitting starters in the preseason. During Rath’s first year there, the Rams ranked first in Football Outsiders’ adjusted games lost metric.

“We got crushed by the media for not playing starters in the preseason, and we went to the Super Bowl,” Rath said. “Here, it’s very similar. We got crushed, we’re not practicing long enough in training camp, all those things.”

He was placed on leave for the 2019 playoffs after being charged with sexual battery but was found not guilty and reinstated later that year. The Inquirer reported in 2020 that the Eagles did their due diligence and felt comfortable with their findings.

Rath became well-known because of an NFL Films clip showing him keeping McVay off the field and out of the official’s pathway during the 2018-19 playoffs. For the Eagles, he still does some coach corralling in addition to his pick-up duty on the sideline.

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It may not come as a surprise, given Sirianni’s sideline demeanor, but Rath said his new post is more demanding than his last one.

“I do more get-backing with Nick than I ever did with Sean,” Rath said. “Thank God they haven’t shown this on film because there’s a lot of stuff that goes into it that we have to prevent Nick from getting in trouble for.”

Before Los Angeles, Rath spent seven seasons with the Detroit Lions and then one year with the Miami Dolphins. He overlapped with both Suh and Darius Slay in Detroit and was one of the first people to reach out to them when they joined the Eagles.

Slay said Rath sent him quarantine-friendly workouts hours after he was traded to the Eagles in 2020.

“We clicked off the jump,” Slay said. “I know how he operates. He’s for sure a player-first guy, so I already knew how the team was going to be.”

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At State Farm Stadium, Rath’s attire choices won’t be as striking. He may even break a sweat rushing over to fallen players on the sideline, but it’s a contribution he views as essential.

“For me to be able to help a guy up and save and conserve a little bit of energy?” Rath said. “That’s an easy thing for me to do. I’ll be out there all day. I don’t care. If I gotta waste energy to help a guy up to conserve Miles Sanders’ energy, that’s well worth that little 1% difference, and hopefully it will add up and accumulate.”

The Eagles are one win away from their second championship. Join Inquirer Eagles writers EJ Smith, Josh Tolentino, Jeff McLane, Marcus Hayes and Mike Sielski on Gameday Central Sunday at 5 p.m. as they preview the game at inquirer.com/Eaglesgameday