Four guys, 10 years, all Eagles: Jason Kelce, Brandon Graham, Fletcher Cox, and Lane Johnson ride together one last time
It's remarkable that the four of them have been this good, and stayed together, for this long. In a way, they've become the foundation of the franchise.
They’re the Eagles’ core four, all Pro Bowlers at one time or another, all Super Bowl champions. They have played a combined 696 regular-season and postseason games ... and not one for any other NFL team. They have delivered memorable speeches, played through unimaginable pain, missed games because of debilitating injuries, donned German shepherd masks to embrace being underdogs, sung songs for a Christmas album, been praised for being the best at their positions, been criticized for failing to live up to their contracts, and been around here so long that it’s getting difficult to remember the days when they weren’t around here.
As of the start of training camp Wednesday, Jason Kelce, Brandon Graham, Fletcher Cox, and Lane Johnson will have been together for a decade. Four guys, 10 years, one team. It’s damn near incomprehensible.
Has anything like this ever happened before in Eagles history? Not in the last three decades. Not during the free-agency era. This is the NFL. It’s rare to have one player last in the league for 10 years, let alone be as productive and essential as each of these players has been, let alone have two of them be on the same team for the same 10 years, let alone three, let alone four, let alone have all four of them play the most grueling and punishing positions on the field.
They’re all linemen, for God’s sake. There’s a reason that David Akers has played more games with the Eagles, 188, than anyone else: He was a kicker. He was a great kicker, and he was more willing to throw blocks and make tackles than most kickers are, and he once, in 2005, made a game-winning field goal despite a torn hamstring. But he was still a kicker. The physical demands for him just weren’t the same.
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Graham at defensive end since 2010, Kelce at center since 2011, Cox at defensive tackle since 2012, Johnson at right tackle since 2013: In so many ways, you don’t play those positions as much as you survive them. Yet the four of them, through the Eagles’ run last season to Super Bowl LVII, were doing much more than surviving. They were excelling, still. Cox had seven sacks, his highest total in four years. Graham had 11, a career high, in a reduced role. Kelce and Johnson were All-Pros, and in the Eagles’ 31-7 victory over the 49ers in the NFC championship Game, Johnson so neutralized Nick Bosa, the league’s defensive player of the year, that not only did Bosa not record a sack all day, he didn’t even record a pressure. He might as well have spent the day tailgating in the parking lot. He would have had as much of an influence on the game’s outcome if he had.
What a luxury for a franchise. What a luxury for its coaching staff.
“I wasn’t like other first-year head coaches,” Nick Sirianni had said before that championship game. “Why do I say that? And why I said that was because I had these unbelievable players who have been to the mountaintop, who have played in this league for 10-plus years, two on the offensive line, two on the defensive line, and like that’s a huge, huge advantage to have those leaders on your football team.”
Consider the changes, the evolution in who the Eagles have been and how they go about things, that the four of them have experienced here. “I feel like me and B.G. been married for 11 years now,” Cox said. Kelce, Graham, and Cox all played for Andy Reid, which means each of them has played for four head coaches. Drafting Johnson with the fourth overall pick in ‘13 was one of the earliest player-personnel decisions of the Chip Kelly era — and maybe the best. They’ve been to the mountaintop, and they’ve been trapped in the basement. They’ve seen quarterbacks come and quarterbacks go, quarterbacks who were billed to be saviors, quarterbacks who for varying periods played like saviors: Michael Vick, Nick Foles, Sam Bradford, Carson Wentz, now Jalen Hurts. Cox and Graham have had to adjust to different defenses and different roles in those defenses. Graham became a linebacker for Billy Davis. Cox recoiled from Jonathan Gannon’s passive system in 2021.
It’s easy to forget all those ups and downs, because it’s easy to take the four of them for granted, because everyone has gotten used to having them there every Sunday.
“The foundation for the Philadelphia Eagles defense has been awesome for a long time,” defensive coordinator Sean Desai told reporters in May, “and one of the quotes that Nick uses is ‘the standard is the standard.’ We’re upholding that standard. We’re looking to achieve it. One of the benefits that oftentimes, even maybe I may have taken for granted being a part of other organizations, is you have guys like BG, Fletch… You want to talk about setting the standard. They set it from 10, 12, 14 years ago. They’ve done a tremendous job in making sure that standard doesn’t slip through the waves of the NFL.
“That’s the standard that we’re going to uphold. We’re going to make sure we honor those guys.”
There will be only so many chances left to do that. Kelce and Graham are both 35. Johnson is 33. Cox turns 33 in December. Johnson is signed through 2026, but each of the remaining three is on a one-year contract. When projecting how the Eagles will fare this season — Can they return to the Super Bowl? Can they fend off the 49ers and Cowboys in the NFC? — it’s natural to ask how much these four, at their ages, after so much wear and tear, have left to give. Can they be as good as they’ve always been, and what effect will it have if they aren’t? Expectations for the Eagles are high, and those what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kinds of questions come with that territory, and who knows? Maybe it will be harder for Kelce, Graham, Cox, and Johnson to answer them. Maybe one or more of them won’t be able to answer them at all.
Those questions also can wait, at least for another seven weeks, at least until Sept. 10 in Foxboro against the Patriots. Four guys, 10 years, one team. Pause for a moment, before the Eagles begin playing the games that count, and acknowledge what those numbers and the men behind them have meant around here. The Core Four deserve that much and more.