Brandon Graham is an NFL survivor, and he still means a lot to the Eagles
He's about to begin his 13th season here, and it's easy to forget: After his Achilles tear last year, he could have walked away. It says something about him that he didn't.
Brandon Graham had never torn his Achilles tendon before, so once he did, he wasn’t certain what had happened to him, what he was feeling in the lower part of his left leg, and why he was feeling it.
This was Sept. 19, 10 months ago, and an injury cart was wheeling him down a Lincoln Financial Field tunnelway. The Eagles would lose to the 49ers that day, 17-11, and they would lose Graham for the rest of the season, and the word alone — Achilles — conjured worst-case scenarios in his mind.
“Once I knew it was an Achilles,” Graham was saying Wednesday, “I thought, ‘Man, damn, that’s the one that everybody said they didn’t want.’”
He was saying this at the NovaCare Complex, not long after the end of the first practice of his 13th training camp with the Eagles. He was a “full go” at that workout, he said, and will be throughout camp, his injury now an afterthought.
To say that Graham has been through a lot over that time, done a lot, seen a lot, is to understate the matter to the point of absurdity. He withstood not being Earl Thomas, whom the Eagles could have drafted and didn’t. He withstood his former defensive line coach Jim Washburn, who didn’t like Graham and whom Graham didn’t like. He withstood a 4-12 season under Andy Reid in 2012 and a 6-9 record with Chip Kelly in 2015 and a 4-11-1 season with Doug Pederson in 2020, joining Fletcher Cox and Jason Kelce as the only players left on the roster who have ridden all those waves.
Even this ruptured Achilles — the two months in bed, the slight weight gain — was not the worst of it. The worst of it was the double-barreled knee trauma he suffered in 2011: first a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, then microfracture surgery shortly thereafter. Two months off his feet then, too, his legs atrophying — and he was just 23, in his second year in the NFL.
“So I didn’t really know how to grind like I do now,” he said. “I was more ready and prepared when I hurt myself this time around because I’d been there before. Me having that experience helped me that whole time of not quitting and keeping the negative mindset out and trying to be as positive as you can and just handle what’s in front of you every day. Whatever comes, it comes. …
“Then you’ve got to get back on your feet, and you’ve got to work. And it really taught me again, even from when I hurt my knee, I had a test during that time of ‘How bad do you want it? You want to come back, right?’”
Graham’s presence with the Eagles has become so familiar over time that it’s easy to overlook the decision he had to make, the priorities he had to weigh, just to return to play this season.
Yes, he acknowledged Wednesday that treatment of Achilles ruptures have advanced to the point that his rehabilitation wasn’t nearly as difficult as he expected it to be: “It’s a new day and age with the medicine that’s going on. It was really a breeze other than just making sure I was in shape.”
Yes, his role in Jonathan Gannon’s defense promises to be different from what he has been accustomed to later in his career: multiple fronts, sometimes a 4-3, sometimes a 3-4, sometimes Graham down with his hand on the ground, sometimes Graham upright as if he were back playing linebacker in Billy Davis’ defense from 2013 to 2015. “I love that we do both,” he said.
Still, would anyone have blamed him if he had opted to walk away? What was left for him to accomplish? He turned 34 in April. He had been a Super Bowl champion — hell, he had made the play that earned the Eagles and himself the right to call themselves champions. He had been to the Pro Bowl. He is married with two young children, and if you don’t think the opportunity to spend more time with your family doesn’t exert a strong and profound pull on even a professional athlete at his sport’s highest level, then chances are you are not happily married and don’t have young children.
But there was another desire tugging at him. It was just as strong.
“I’m so excited just being back with the guys,” he said. “A new appreciation, being gone. Now, having the opportunity to be back, man, we’ve got a good team, and I want to take full advantage of every day we get to spend together because we’ve got something special. …
“I’m in no rush to leave the field. As you know, time is flying. Once we get started with this season, it’s going to be over, and I’ll be going into 14.”
Time is flying so fast that Brandon Graham already has penciled himself in for a 14th year with the Eagles. Go ahead. Find someone, after all this time, after all he has done and seen, to bet against him.
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