Football is life: Before Tanner McKee became an Eagles QB, he was an honorary Coritiba Crocodile in Brazil

Before leaving for his two-year mission in Curitiba, the biggest city in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil, 18-year-old Tanner McKee tossed a football in one of his two large suitcases under the assumption that it wouldn’t get much use.

McKee, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had committed to Stanford to play football in 2018 as a four-star quarterback prospect out of Corona, Calif. But he deferred his enrollment so he could serve a mission, putting his athletic career on hold. The leaders of the church informed McKee that he had been called to serve in Curitiba, where his top priority would be spreading “the gospel of Jesus Christ,” the Eagles’ 2023 sixth-round pick said.

So, the football mostly remained tucked away for the first 10 months. It occasionally made the trip with McKee outdoors on his preparation day, the half day he was allotted each week to contact family, clean the house, or partake in some sort of physical activity.

“I remember throwing the ball over power lines and little kids being all excited,” McKee said. “Or just trying to teach them the rules, and they were all confused why the ball was not in a circular shape and things like that. That was kind of how it really was going for a long time.”

That changed when one of McKee’s mission presidents, the couple in charge of the missionaries in the area, discovered the existence of a local, semipro American football team called the Coritiba Crocodiles. He contacted the team and told them about McKee, inquiring if the Crocodiles would be interested in practicing with him and having a discussion about faith and life afterward.

He also invited John Beck, the former NFL quarterback with Miami and Washington who became the co-owner of an elite quarterback training company called 3DQB upon his retirement. McKee has trained with Beck and 3DQB, which is based in Huntington Beach, Calif., since he was in high school.

Beck is also a member of the church and played at Brigham Young, serving his mission in Lisbon, Portugal, before embarking upon his college career. He called the opportunity for McKee to engage in a bit of organized football on his mission an “extremely, extremely rare opportunity.”

“The guy that was in charge of Tanner’s mission was familiar with me because of my time at Brigham Young University and the NFL,” Beck said. “And then he was also a big football fan. And he felt like it was very fortunate for him to be able to have a missionary like Tanner in his mission. So he felt like if I can do something that can help this missionary as well as something for the community, this would be great.”

In addition to allowing them to practice with the Crocodiles, the mission president also gave Beck permission to train McKee for a couple of days. The two met at a field to throw routes and go through a training program, all in an effort to make the young quarterback’s transition back to football easier when he returned home.

The next day, McKee and Beck met the Crocodiles at an unlined field for practice, where some of the players had to shoo away chickens and roosters first to clear the space. McKee said the players ranged in age from 14 to 40, seeing as there aren’t a variety of levels to play like there are in the United States.

Still, McKee and Beck were impressed with the team’s collective football knowledge and ability. The Crocodiles went through their typical drills, and the quarterback and coach would jump in or chime in with their insight on how they would read a particular play. McKee even took an unpadded live rep in a seven-on-seven drill, much to the dismay of his mission president.

While McKee and Beck communicated with the players in Portuguese, they noticed that most of them knew at least a few English phrases related to the sport, especially the names of routes.

“So they would say, like, ‘stick route,’ or, ‘hot route,’ and you’re just like, ‘Yeah! That’s what we call it,’” McKee said. “A lot of them were pretty proficient in English. Some of it due to just football or playing video games online, and some of them took classes and were good with the language.”

The Crocodiles’ passion for the sport seeped through in everything they did, from the drills they executed to the humble field they practiced on to the clothes they wore. Their uniforms weren’t matching. The players didn’t show up with “fancy cleats,” Beck said. Regardless, everyone found a way with what they had to play the game.

“We were uniting on a shared activity that we love,” Beck said.

Athos Daniel Jr., a former tight end and wide receiver for the Crocodiles, found McKee’s expertise valuable due to his perspective as an incoming Division I quarterback. Through a translator, Athos told The Inquirer that McKee was impressed with his speed and size — according to his Hudl page, Athos is 6-foot-3 and 231 pounds. McKee encouraged him to work on catching over-the-shoulder passes and high-pointing the ball so he could use his frame to his advantage in the passing game.

» READ MORE: Some Eagles are worried about the São Paulo trip. Tanner McKee aims to talk them down.

In addition to the on-the-field advice, Athos appreciated McKee’s story of perseverance that he shared after the training session. When he was 16, McKee was diagnosed with melanoma, a dangerous type of skin cancer. After undergoing surgery to remove a mole on his forehead and two lymph nodes in his neck, he was deemed cancer-free.

“I identified with him because I also used to have heart issues when I was young and also needed surgery as well,” said Athos, who plays on the Brazilian national flag football team. “So for me personally, that was very cool since we had similar stories and I was able to use him as an inspiration and as an example.”

McKee and Beck weren’t the only inspirational figures in attendance at their post-practice discussion. Beck FaceTimed Dak Prescott, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback who is also a 3DQB client. It was the first time an active NFL player had contacted the Crocodiles, so Athos said that the group was excited to meet him.

“For these guys in Brazil where the NFL game can feel distant, for those moments, the NFL game’s so close,” Beck said.

But the players weren’t the only ones who walked away with lasting lessons from the session. The experience training with semipro athletes gave McKee a refreshed perspective on the sport that he put to the side while serving his mission, particularly on the monotonous details of the day-to-day grind.

One of the players that McKee met was meticulous about tracking his protein intake, for example. For McKee, adequately fueling his body is part of his job. The player had no similar incentive. The undertaking is simply a by-product of his love for the game, McKee explained.

“He was like, ‘I just want to be the best football player I can,’” McKee said. “He’s not getting paid. He’s not trying to get a scholarship or anything. He’s just trying to be a good football player because he wants to work hard and better himself.”

» READ MORE: Brazil’s Eagles fans and their online community are coming together to party: ‘This will be their Super Bowl’

McKee carried that mindset home when he resumed his training sessions with Beck. He was self-admittedly out of shape. Still, the 6 a.m. lifts and the conditioning sessions suddenly felt like privileges, not punishments.

“I was like, I cannot wait to go run and go throw and just not take for granted even the tough training sessions that are tough on your body and exhausting,” McKee said. “They’re just like, ‘I get to play a game.’ I feel like I kind of got a different perspective that way, just from being away from the game for so long.”

His persistence throughout his acclimation paid off, with Beck in his corner to help him tackle those challenges of being away from the game for two years. McKee went on to start 21 of 23 games at Stanford in three seasons, finishing his junior year in 2022 with the ninth-most single-season passing yards by a quarterback in school history (2,947 yards).

For the first time since his mission, McKee will return to Brazil as the third-string quarterback of the Eagles, who will play the Green Bay Packers in São Paulo on Friday. His parents, wife, in-laws, and mission presidents will be in attendance at Corinthians Arena for the NFL’s first game in South America. Athos and a handful of his former teammates are making the trip, too.

“I think it will be a great start, [the] NFL will open a great door here in Brazil,” Athos said. “Brazil has a lot of potential to receive the NFL and it’s good that this is a game where Tanner will be participating, since he’s the most Brazilian American.”

McKee said he hopes it won’t be his last time in the country. He aspires to host a youth football camp in Curitiba in the offseason, continuing to maintain a relationship with the city he called home for two years.

For now, the unofficial ambassador to Brazil for the Eagles is just eager for his teammates to get a glimpse of the place and its people that gave him a new perspective on his journey through life and football.

“I’m really excited for them to see the culture and meet some of the people, even if there is a little language barrier there,” McKee said. “You can still feel the love of the culture and the people.”

The Eagles play in their season opener against the Green Bay Packers in São Paulo, Brazil. Join Eagles beat reporters Olivia Reiner and EJ Smith as they dissect the hottest storylines surrounding the team on Gameday Central, live from Corinthians Arena.