Jalen Carter has a chance to be great. The Eagles can’t afford anything less from him.

As a group of reporters and media members approached him at his locker Tuesday, Jalen Carter ran his hands down either side of his torso, as if he were a fashion model strutting fiercely along a catwalk. “I feel like I’m looking good,” he said, “and it’s going to show on the field.” He lives in Center City but “hasn’t explored too many restaurants.” Just about everything he eats is from the Eagles’ cafeteria and follows their meal plan for him — steak, grilled chicken, salad. He’ll take a plate home for dinner but takes care to finish it before 9 p.m. at the latest. He is definitely lighter than he was at the start of last season, though he said he doesn’t know how much. Maybe 10 pounds. The Eagles list him, officially, at 314.

“Sometimes I feel good. Sometimes I feel bad,” he said. “Other teams got real big O-lines, 350, 360, so sometimes I feel like the weight helps with my strength and stuff. But slimming down helps me move faster. And we’ve got a good weight program, so I feel like that’s getting me stronger, too.”

A faster and stronger Carter isn’t just a delicious fantasy for the Eagles. It’s a necessity. Just like there were two Eagles teams last season — the one that went 10-1 and was atop the NFC, the one that crashed and burned over the final seven weeks — there were two Carters.

There was the Carter who was immediately a dominant defensive tackle, who through his first eight games had four sacks and seemed like a shoo-in as the NFL’s Defensive Rookie of the Year. Then there was the Carter who, like so many of his teammates along the defensive line, either ran out of gas in the season’s second half, was ill-served by defensive coordinators Sean Desai and Matt Patricia, or both.

“I don’t feel like I hit a wall,” Carter said. “There’s a lot of excuses people are saying about what happened last year. I ain’t got no excuses. What happened, happened. We’re on to this year.”

No excuses then, no excuses again. There can’t be, not if the Eagles are going to fulfill their championship hopes. They aspire to be the kind of team that competes for a Super Bowl every season, no easy trick in a salary-cap league. To do that, they have to replenish their talent pool through the draft with players who are more than just average starters. They have to find franchise mainstays — Brandon Graham, Fletcher Cox, Jason Kelce, Lane Johnson — and the easiest place to find such players is in the draft’s first round.

That was the promise that Carter offered last year. He wasn’t just the ninth overall pick in the 2023 draft. He was a prospect who, based on his talent and his playing career at Georgia, was considered worthy of being the No. 1 overall pick … and perhaps would have been had he not been charged with two misdemeanors related to a fatal car crash two months earlier.

» READ MORE: Jalen Carter lawsuit continues after survivor of crash settles with Georgia

The Eagles took a chance that Carter’s involvement in that incident was a terrible anomaly and not a true reflection of the young man he was or would be. So far, their gamble has paid off. Carter has neither caused any apparent trouble nor come close to committing another horrible mistake. But they didn’t draft him just to be a good kid and keep his nose clean.

He is well aware of the pressure to develop into the superstar he appeared bound to become based on his play early last season, especially considering the makeup of the rest of the Eagles’ defensive line and edge rushers. Jordan Davis, Nolan Smith, Josh Sweat, and Bryce Huff are all, to one degree or another, question marks. Carter can make all of them better, assuming he turns out to be as good as everyone expects him to be.

“I like that,” he said. “I got no problem with it. It’s football. It’s my job. … Going No. 9, I know people look at that and think, ‘Oh, he’s supposed to be the best in the world at his position’ and all this. But at the end of the day, it’s still a team sport. Just like when I play and need them, when they play, they need me.”

A couple of lockers down from Carter, Graham sat at his locker. He’s 36, gray flecking his beard, a first-round pick himself back in 2010. It took him a few years of fighting through injuries and settling into some new defensive systems before he began to justify, fully, the Eagles’ decision to draft him. Now he’s the franchise’s all-time leader in games played, a beloved fixture around here. What was the key for him, and what will be the key for Carter to reach his potential?

» READ MORE: With Jason Kelce and Fletcher Cox gone, the future of the Eagles could depend on their replacements

“Lean on people who were here before you,” Graham said. “Trent Cole was a good one for me. Even though he didn’t go first [round], he was in the prime position, where I wanted to be. I saw him as a pro who did it the right way. That’s what you do. You start to learn from them and see what you can take from them and see what you’re already doing good and just let it happen.”

What does he see from Carter?

“Get ready,” Graham said. “It’s coming.”

It had better be.