Nick Foles and other 2018 Super Bowl champs testify in Philly court for ex-Eagles captain suing his doctors

Trading in shoulder pads for a green button-down shirt, 2018 Super Bowl MVP Nick Foles strode to the witness stand in a Philadelphia City Hall courtroom Thursday, delivering some brotherly love for his former teammate and friend, Chris Maragos.

During the Eagles’ historic 2017-18 season, Foles told the jury, Maragos “was in the peak of his game.”

“Listen, you don’t become captain for a Super Bowl team and you’re bad. You’re elite,” Foles said of Maragos, the former All-Pro Eagles standout special teamer suing his doctors for “medical negligence” in treating a knee injury which kept Maragos from playing in the championship and led to his retirement a year later.

“At the time, he was at his best,” Foles said.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen a [player with a] knee injury that didn’t return in the NFL in my time,” Foles told the jury. “They’re so good at surgeries nowadays, a guy gets injured and tears his knee, you don’t even blink an eye.”

» READ MORE: A former Eagles captain is suing his doctors in Philly court over a career-ending knee injury

Foles is now a quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts. But his return to Philadelphia to testify in a City Hall courtroom on behalf of his former teammate comes as the Birds prepare to compete in another Super Bowl, against the Kansas City Chiefs.

And Philadelphians, or at least those in City Hall Thursday, were excited to see him roaming the building.

One passerby thanked Foles for “saving the city.” Another asked him for his autograph, while others stopped for photos.

» READ MORE: Nick Foles is back in Philly for the first time since he was an Eagle. He has advice for Hurts and hopes for a future in the city.

Watching Maragos — a close and longtime friend who Foles said is the first person he calls when he’s going through a hard time — struggle after the injury has been difficult, Foles said. Maragos’ lawyers have said he still suffers from pain, walks with a limp, and will need a knee replacement in the future.

“It’s been brutal, watching him go through it, watching him walk. This dude was flying down the field going a million miles an hour,” Foles testified during about a half-hour on the witness stand. “Even watching him walk [to the courtroom] … it’s tough. His life has been changed dramatically in the blink of an eye.”

The quarterback was one of three of Maragos’ former Eagles teammates to take the witness stand this week in a star-studded medical malpractice trial in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, which also included testimony from Foles’ Philly Special counterpart, tight end Trey Burton, and former Eagles linebacker Jordan Hicks.

Maragos’ lawsuit, playing out in a civil jury trial, contends that his NFL career was cut short by his doctors’ treatment of his knee injury.

Maragos is suing his surgeon, James Bradley — an esteemed Pittsburgh-based orthopedic surgeon well-known for treating NFL players — as well as the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, whose doctors serve as Eagles team physicians and who oversaw his rehabilitation.

The trial centers on an October 2017 game between the Eagles and the Carolina Panthers, in which Maragos tore his posterior cruciate ligament (PCL), and the treatment that followed.

After that sidelining knee injury, Maragos went to Bradley, who performed surgery to repair the ligament. But Maragos’ lawyers argue that Bradley ignored a second injury in the safety’s knee — a torn meniscus — leading to further damage during rehabilitation.

» READ MORE: Ex-Eagles captain Chris Maragos is suing his doctors in Philly court. Here are the types of knee injuries tackled in the trial.

Through a flurry of doctors’ notes and MRIs projected onto a screen in the courtroom, lawyers for Bradley and Rothman have argued that the doctor did inspect Maragos’ meniscus tear, but found it to be “stable,” and determined that performing surgery would further hamper the safety’s recovery and return to the field.

“It’s a judgment call,” said Bradley, who was inducted last year into the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine’s hall of fame after serving more than 30 years as the Pittsburgh Steelers’ team surgeon, in a video deposition shown to the jury Wednesday.

» READ MORE: Carson Wentz's surgeon, James Bradley, is an innovator well-known for work with athletes

Bradley said in the deposition that he had “misspoken” in referencing that there was a “root tear” in Maragos’ meniscus from a November 2017 note and that “if it [was] a true tear that I think is unstable, then I would have repaired it.”

Showing the jury a video of Maragos running on the turf following his surgery at 19 miles per hour, attorneys for Bradley and Rothman say Maragos’ knee recovery was progressing in early 2018 following the PCL surgery, but that his meniscus was further aggravated in a separate instance during rehabilitation months after the surgery, when Maragos twisted his body on a weight machine.

And, they argue that Maragos had a long, eight-year run in the NFL — more than double the average professional career of 3.3 years — and that at 31, with arthritis, bowed legs, and a flattened tibial slope, Maragos’ playing time couldn’t be extended by more surgeries.

While Foles was on the stand, Bradley’s attorney, John C. Conti, quoted a line from the quarterback’s book: “If you can’t cut it physically or mentally, there’s a long line of guys in the wings who would take your spot.”

(Attorneys for Maragos have sought to discredit that argument, noting that a breadth of players’ NFL careers extend past age 30.)

After his injury during the historic Super Bowl season, Maragos never returned to an NFL field. Despite rehabilitation and efforts to return to the NFL, doctors eventually told him he would no longer professionally play, and he retired in 2019.

If Maragos could have, Burton told the jury Wednesday, “he would have returned, no question.”

Burton, whom attorneys called to the witness stand as Lawrence Godfrey “Trey” Burton III (“government name,” he quipped), told jurors how he became fast friends and “attached at the hip” with Maragos on one of his first days in the Eagles’ locker room.

While Burton, 29, a free agent, said in 2018 he was already thinking about “phasing myself out” of playing professionally due to concerns about injuries and later, hesitancy about receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, Maragos “never wanted to not play.”

After Maragos’ second knee surgery, Burton said he was concerned for his usually ebullient friend and “how broken he was.”

Hicks, the now-Minnesota Vikings linebacker, spent most of the Eagles’ 2017 Super Bowl run injured with Maragos. The ex-Eagle arrived in Philly in 2015 as a rookie, and said Wednesday that he quickly became close to “Gos.”

“We built a bond and a friendship that is deeper than football,” he said.

A game after Maragos busted his knee, Hicks tore his Achilles tendon for the second time. Hicks — who previously also tore his shoulder and injured his groin — said that these are the types of injuries NFL players expect to return from. They fear brain trauma or sudden cardiac arrest as Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered this year, but not injuries to their muscles and bones.

“Somebody tears a knee every week in the NFL,” he said.

During that season, Maragos and Hicks were among a group of injured Eagles that also included running back Darren Sproles, quarterback Carson Wentz, and offensive tackle Jason Peters.

“There was no doubt in anybody’s mind at the time that [Maragos] was on pace to come back, just like the rest of us,” Hicks told jurors.

» READ MORE: Ex-Eagles captain Chris Maragos is suing his doctors in Philly court. Here are the types of knee injuries tackled in the trial.

Hicks said that as an athlete, sports is a part of the family life he envisions. The 30-year-old father of three said that he always thought about seeing the day his kid beats him at basketball. All that is no longer an option for Maragos, he said. Hicks testified that when their families go on vacation together, Chris can’t walk on beach sand for more than five minutes or stand up on a boat while fishing — let alone play basketball with his kids. It’s too unstable for his knee.

“It’s sad, it’s very sad,” he said.

While Maragos and Hicks rehabbed in 2017 and 2018, they joined forces with Burton to incorporate TopTier Wealth Management, which specializes in working with NFL players. Hicks rejected the idea that the business was a way to transition out of active play, and said the trio launched the firm as a way to help players make the most of their earnings after hearing too many stories of athletes who fell prey to bad investments. They now are investors in the business.

Maragos’ family now resides in Michigan, his wife, Serah, told the jury. In addition to his work with TopTier, Maragos, 36, owns a commercial property with Burton, as well as a car wash.

Jurors have also heard from other medical experts, and an economist who told them that Maragos lost close to $8.7 million in earnings by not being able to play in the NFL after his injury — assuming he would have played until 2022.

After Maragos’ witnesses are finished testifying, defense attorneys will get a chance to present their side.

Common Pleas Judge Charles J. Cunningham III has repeatedly encouraged lawyers in the case to continue to work toward a resolution, though none has been finalized.