Hands, shoulders, hips and toes: The week-by-week physical toll of an NFL season on Eagles center Jason Kelce

If you’re not an Eagles fan, you probably know Jason Kelce best as the guy who stood in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum steps in a colorful Mummers outfit and delivered an animated speech about underdogs during the Eagles’ Super Bowl parade in February 2018. If you’re an Eagles fan, you know him as the 2011 sixth-round pick who earned the starting center job as a rookie and has served as the brain behind the team’s offense at the line of scrimmage ever since. You also can probably recite a few lines from the speech.

Kelce has come a long way since he made the University of Cincinnati football team as a walk-on linebacker. After the 2018 season, he had started all 116 games of his eight-year career, including the playoffs, and hadn’t missed a game since 2014. His streak of 73 straight regular-season starts was the longest for any active center and included four seasons in which he was named either an All-Pro or a Pro Bowler.

But when the 2018 season concluded, there was no guarantee that streak would continue. Eventually, after contemplating retirement, Kelce signed an extension through the 2021 season. Later in the offseason, he explained why retirement at 31 had been a possibility: In order to play in all 18 Eagles games that year, Kelce suffered through an MCL tear, a torn elbow, a busted knee and a broken toe.

“At one point, I had a brace on the entire left side of my body, and that starts to bother you a little bit,” Kelce said at the time.

Football can be a beautiful game. It is also a brutal game that wrecks bodies and minds. A player is only listed on the team’s official injury report if his ability to practice is affected. Very few of us understand the physical pain and accompanying fortitude required to endure 16 games or more.

Entering the 2019 season, Kelce agreed to let The Athletic chronicle the weekly toll football took on his body. Over the course of the season, 555 NFL players will be placed on injured reserve. Kelce will play every single offensive snap for the Eagles. It won’t be easy.

Week 1

Six days before the season opener, Kelce is feeling pretty good. None of the significant injuries from last season lingered into the summer and training camp, and his limited preseason action went without incident. His right knee has been a chronic issue over the last few years, but an odd recent discovery has helped him and the Eagles training staff alleviate the pain. His hip flexor feels pretty tight at times, which might be related to the sports hernia surgery he had in 2014. He’s also 31 years old, with a lifetime’s worth of wear and tear, so his joints ache all over.

Otherwise, Kelce should be able to start the season on a healthy foot … except his left big toe is entirely black underneath the nail. At some point during camp, offensive lineman Halapoulivaati Vaitai, and all of his 320 pounds, stepped right on Kelce’s foot.

Then, there are the victimized body parts that every NFL player deals with and no one complains about — hands. Every position tolerates “minor” hand and finger injuries over the course of the season. Safety Malcolm Jenkins, who will play every defensive snap for the Eagles this season, often uses a shoehorn when getting dressed because of how gnarled his hands become during the year. Kelce enters the season with just a jammed finger.

Jason Kelce reacts after a first down in the season opener. (Bill Streicher / USA Today)

Week 2

The Eagles win their season opener at home over Washington 32-27.

“First game of the season, the biggest thing you notice being sore is your neck,” Kelce says a few days later, “because that’s the most times you’ve hit somebody with your head repetitively over and over again. So, my traps and my neck are really sore. But then also your hands. My hands, if you’re using your hands right, they’re gonna always be sore. (My right hand) in particular, because this finger’s already torn right there, it just always, it starts getting locked up (the) day after games. It’s better now. Around this time of the week, it starts getting better. … Or it just doesn’t get any better and you have to deal with a shitty hand.”

Kelce’s right hand is especially vulnerable because he doesn’t wear a glove on his snapping hand. Complicating matters are the anti-inflammatories he takes before games that thin the blood, which means whenever he gets a cut on his hand, the bleeding doesn’t stop. That’s when the training staff will spray the cut with a substance Kelce describes as looking like thick, dark gunpowder.

“Stings like a motherfucker,” he says. “And then it usually stops after they do it once. Might have to do it twice.”

As for his neck, Kelce says the soreness subsides as the week goes on. He also has a split ear from the first game, the result of a new helmet he’s wearing. And there’s a mysterious cut on his left forearm thanks to the hanging Velcro on another player’s glove. Welcome to the start of the season.

Who knew Velcro was so dangerous? (Bo Wulf / The Athletic)

Week 3

The Eagles lose in Atlanta on “Sunday Night Football,” thanks in part to a sequence of events in which wide receivers Alshon Jeffery and DeSean Jackson and tight end Dallas Goedert all sustain injuries before the end of the first quarter.

Kelce’s game includes an odd moment in the second quarter when he jogs off the field toward the wrong sideline. It looks like a tell-tale example of someone suffering the effects of a concussion. Kelce is evaluated for a head injury but returns to the game without missing a play.

The next day, he explained the situation on Instagram.

“On the drive, I ran off the field in the wrong direction, the defense did something unusual,” he wrote. “On third down, they were running a standard T-E stunt (tackle penetrates and the end loops); normally, I sit in the hole and take the end looping around, but instead, the tackle also made an inside movie, and it resulted in pressure on the QB. Me being an analytical person, I immediately start to wonder if I could have done something differently on the play. Should I have (taken) the tackle instead of blocking the end, should I have gotten more depth on my set, or width to make the tackle feel like he couldn’t go inside? In the midst of all this running through my head, it’s fourth down, and since I am not on (the field goal unit), I exit the field in the same direction I had come on and off the field the entire first quarter. The only problem is that the first quarter ended at the beginning of the drive. … By the time I get to the sideline and pick my head up, I find myself staring at the Atlanta bench.”

Kelce is far from flippant about concussions. He’s grateful to have never been diagnosed with one during his career, which he attributes to some combination of luck, the position he plays, always wearing a mouthpiece — even though he knows there’s no proven connection between wearing a mouthpiece and limiting concussions — and, somewhat in jest, his unusually shaped head. There’s an oft-told story in Kelce family lore about a scare when doctors thought three-month-old Jason’s head was dangerously big. Those fears were assuaged when an older, grizzled doctor suggested measuring the size of Kelce’s father’s head. There’s nothing to worry about when the abnormally large apple falls next to the tree.

Kelce is also fully aware that the accumulation of sub-concussive blows from a lifetime of banging helmets is liable to show its effects down the line. One of the more common jokes in the Eagles locker room is something to the effect of, “Must be the CTE acting up,” when someone forgets something. There’s also the likely concussion he suffered away from the football field.

“When I was in college, the girls lacrosse team decided to have a dodgeball tournament,” he says. “The winner of the dodgeball tournament got a free keg of beer at whatever bar you wanted it at. And in college, this is like, ‘We gotta win this keg of beer.’ Well, a bunch of (Cincinnati) teammates and I decided we were gonna compete in this thing. And we get down, I think we’re in the semifinals. And we’re playing a team that, ‘professional’ probably isn’t the right word, but this was like a group of dodgeball people that went around doing this. Like, that’s what they did. And we were obviously not that. But somehow, we got down, and I was the only person left, and there were three of them, I think. And I get as far back as possible — they’re doing the whole thing where they have all the balls, right? They’re just timing it up so they throw all three at the same time. They throw, one hits off my shoulder. And it goes way up in the air, and it’s like I’m a part of this movie — I’m watching it go behind me. So I start running and leap, jump, catch the ball. And go head-first into a brick wall.”

Of course, that dodgeball tournament had no concussion protocol. Kelce finished the game. His team won the tournament and the beer that came with it.

Week 4

After losing at home to Detroit, the Eagles face a short week before a Thursday night game in Green Bay.

“There’s two different schools of thought,” Kelce says. “Some guys hate the short week. I know it gets a lot of criticism. I actually love the short week, to be honest with you. You don’t do anything for three or four days after the game (and then) you get the mini-bye. And then leading up to the week, (the practices are all) walkthroughs. There’s nothing too taxing. It’s actually one of the lighter weeks you’re gonna get during the season. Don’t get me wrong, you’re definitely not as prepared Thursday as you are for a Sunday game. You lack a little bit of the extra film study, you try to get as much as you can. Your body is still gonna be recovering from the previous game. So all that plays into it, but (the other team is) struggling with that stuff, too.”

Body-wise, Kelce’s neck and traps have adjusted to the weekly pounding. The pain in his knee is nagging but manageable. His hands are still a mess.

There’s one other complication to Kelce’s season he’s never dealt with before. His wife, Kylie, is pregnant with the couple’s first child. She’s due soon, and the Thursday game might be a blessing. If everything checks out, there’s a good chance she’ll be induced this weekend when Kelce is home without football responsibilities.

Week 5

After an upset win over the Packers, Kelce shows up for practice on Monday without any news to report on the baby front. He escaped the Thursday game without serious injury. But the three-day stretch of doing nothing actually made Monday’s practice more difficult.

“Your body gets used to a certain rhythm of doing things, and when you don’t do it and you try to get back into it, the first day or two is always like trying to get used to it again,” he says.

On Thursday, Kelce shows up to work as a new father. His daughter, Wyatt, was born the night before, and both baby and mom are doing well. His parents and Kylie’s parents are at the hospital so “there’s not much I can do,” he says.

“I did very minimal work,” Kelce says. “It’s pretty remarkable. It was an incredible moment. I was reminded by my dad of a story when my brother (Travis) was born. My brother came two years after I did, and one of the nurses, when I was kind of in the waiting room, came over. ‘Oh, what do you wanna be when you grow up?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I wanna be a dad.’ So, it’s kind of come full circle.”

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Chunked up the Deuces on her way out. Wyatt Elizabeth Kelce 10/2/2019 8lbs 6oz

A post shared by Jason Kelce (@jason.kelce) on Oct 3, 2019 at 6:25am PDT

Week 6

The Eagles make easy work of the Jets to move to 3-2, but only after an uncoordinated start for Kelce and the offensive line. During the first offensive drive, Kelce gets tangled with one of his guards on three plays in a four-play span. First, he trips left guard Isaac Seumalo, then Seumalo trips Kelce, then Kelce steps on right guard Brandon Brooks’ left foot.

“It was very weird,” Kelce says.

In 2018, after he suffered a broken left pinky toe, Kelce switched footwear to a steel-toe cover. It makes the shoe a little more snug on his size-14 feet but protects his toes from the inevitability of opponents and teammates stepping on them. Kelce planned to go back to the old cleats this year until Vaitai accidentally spiked his toe during camp. Better safe than sorry, he says, especially since the steel-toe cover doesn’t affect his ability to move on the field. The scuffs blanketed across the toe cover indicate just how common those missteps are.

It’s also been another tough week for Kelce’s right hand, but the swelling has subsided by Wednesday.

“I’ve found with hands, the best thing you can do is just do stuff with them,” he says. “I think a lot of the time when you can’t close your hand, the tendency is to not do anything. But the more you can go and actually use your grip strength and use your hands and the dexterity, it just has a way to flush it out. The lifting yesterday for sure helped out big time. I tried to make sure during the lift, instead of using straps around the bars, like you normally do, you actually use your grip strength. It hurts, but it forces you to kind of get everything working in there.”

It could have been the lifting that helped the swelling or it could have been the new eight-pound, six-ounce weight he spent his nights cradling.

“I didn’t think about that, but that might actually be it,” he says. “That definitely required more dexterity and use of my hands than usual.”

The steel-toe cover that protects Kelce’s feet. (Bo Wulf / The Athletic)

Week 7

Coming off a lopsided away loss to the Vikings, Kelce is more gruff than usual about the state of his body. His shoulder is atypically sore, and the Eagles are in the middle of a three-game stretch on the road.

He’s also probably not getting quite as much sleep as he’s used to with the new baby in the house. Normally, he has some trouble falling asleep because of the combination of his stiff hips and a firm mattress. But he usually finds a way to get the kind of rest required of a professional athlete. He needs his sleep.

“If I don’t get eight hours,” Kelce says, shaking his head. “I used to not be that guy. I used to be able to go out all night and come in here after 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. But those days are sadly far gone. Well, maybe not sadly. Thankfully, far gone.”

On a normal Sunday-to-Sunday game week, Kelce usually recovers at home on Mondays. He’ll come into the team facility if he has an injury that requires treatment or he wants to go over something with offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland, but that happens only a handful of times per year. He and former Eagles offensive lineman Evan Mathis used to lift heavily on Mondays, but that feels like a long time ago.

Tuesdays are a light day, with all the players in the facility by 8 a.m. Everyone lifts and there’s a casual walkthrough to go over the prior game and begin to introduce the week’s game plan staples. The day ends around 1 or 1:30 p.m.

Wednesdays start at 8 a.m., too, and include the most intense practice of the week for linemen, as the team goes through its plan for first and second down along with a period of team run, typically in full pads. After meetings, most of the team leaves by about 5 p.m. Thursdays are mostly for third-down and red-zone work, which makes it a more taxing day of practice for wide receivers and cornerbacks. Everyone’s out by 5:30 p.m.

Fridays are light, with a series of walkthroughs and an early exit. Saturday is a mock game, as the team goes over a variety of situations and procedures that could arise. On Sunday, Kelce likes to arrive at the stadium about three hours before game time.

Week 8

Another road loss, this one to the Cowboys in Arlington, Texas, drops the Eagles to 3-4.

There are two major topics of conversation this week. First is the left hip, which has been more troublesome than in years past, and it’s hampering Kelce’s sleep. He’s pretty sure all of the issues with his core are related to the most significant surgery of his career, when he underwent an operation in 2014 to alleviate the pain of a sports hernia that had bothered him for two seasons. He calls it a “remarkable surgery that allowed me to keep playing.”

“These hip flexors, I guess it’s probably related. My sports hernia doesn’t bother me anymore because I’m used to it, but it’s always something that’s there,” he says. “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t notice it. But if they do like an adductor strength test in there, they’re like, ‘Your adductor’s really weak.’ Well yeah, they had to release half the muscles to fix my sports hernia.”

The second area of focus is Kelce’s right knee. For two years, Kelce underwent a series of MRIs to identify an explanation for the chronic pain in his knee. There was general wear and tear, and the cartilage was thinning, but nothing that explained the severity of the pain. That is, until an MRI discovered that Kelce, like approximately 39 percent of the population, has an extra bone in each of his knees. The fabella is a small sesamoid bone that sits on a tendon in the knee and serves no purpose. Kelce jokes that it makes him more like a “Neanderthal.”

Says Kelce: “I think what ends up happening is that bone is back there, and because the calf muscle gets inflamed or the nerve muscle gets inflamed, when I’m noticing that pain, this shuts down, my (quad muscle), and that causes the muscle instability. Once that muscle’s not firing, then my knee doesn’t feel like it’s in place.”

Kelce and the Eagles medical staff began targeting that specific area to loosen it up with a gentle massage and some religious taping to theoretically loosen the skin. Kelce is still not sure the fabella is causing the pain, but he’s not arguing with the results. In the offseason, he’ll cycle off the anti-inflammatories to get a better sense of whether the fabella is the true cause of the pain and will consider surgery to remove the superfluous bone.

Week 9

The Eagles close out their stretch of three straight road games with a win in Buffalo to pull even at 4-4. Kelce’s right hand gets jammed badly enough that he nearly has to leave the game because he’s not sure whether he’ll be able to grip and snap the ball. The center’s not allowed to touch the ball until he’s on the line of scrimmage, so Kelce has to take a few seconds to try to flex his hand before determining whether to stay in the game – which he does.

He also briefly visits the blue medical tent, but that’s just to pee.

In getting a sense of the difficulty of physically making it through an NFL season, it’s important to know that the games themselves can often be the easy part. Really. The week of practice is when the full toll of aches, pains, bumps and bruises is felt. On game day, there is more adrenaline. There is also stronger medication.

Kelce often refers to the anti-inflammatories he takes during the season. Throughout the week, that means diclofenac, which is a more powerful NSAID (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug) than ibuprofen. Before games, it’s something else. He’d prefer not to mention it by name, but it’s not hard to figure out he means Toradol.

“The main reason I do it before every game isn’t because I have any injuries,” he says. “It’s really so my knees, hips and ankles feel like I’m 21 years old again. … I think, pain, even though it might not be enough that you don’t realize you’re thinking about it, I think that when you don’t have pain, your body sends signals more efficiently and your muscles fire more effectively.”

There is a pending lawsuit between former NFL players and the league over the widespread prescription of Toradol, which alleges the drug masks concussion symptoms, though that has not been proven. On all things, Kelce is perpetually curious, analytical and skeptical. His eyes are fully open when it comes to what he puts in his body. He knows that most concussion studies indicate the accumulation of sub-concussive blows is more likely to cause long-term harm than actual concussions. He knows that chronic medication use can lead to liver failure or organ degeneration, and he’s thankful the Eagles do specific liver tests twice a year. Kelce makes it a habit to get his blood work done as often as possible, and he’s never been flagged for anything out of the ordinary. The only side effect he says he experiences is the occasional Monday morning discovery of a surprise bruise because Toradol thins the blood like any other anti-inflammatory.

So, for every NFL game he can remember, Kelce’s routine is to ingest three 10 milligram tablets of Toradol about one hour before he and the team leave the locker room for warmups.

“Right from the get-go, I get to go out to warmups and I don’t have to spend 10 minutes trying to get my hip to feel normal again,” he says. “I get to at least go out there and feel pretty much as close to 100 percent as I’m gonna get.”

Kelce blocks Khalil Mack in the Eagles’ win over the Bears. (Eric Hartline / USA Today)

Week 10

The Eagles defeat the Bears at home and enter the long-anticipated bye week at 5-4. In the postgame locker room, Kelce sits on a folding chair in front of his locker with a gnarly-looking deep cut on his right hand, surely the result of getting spiked by a defensive tackle’s cleat or something else very macho.

“I don’t even know if I wanna tell the story behind how this happened,” he says. “One of the dumbest things that’s ever happened to me. These chairs, see how they fold up? So, I was getting dressed before practice, and somehow the back of my pant caught it like this.”

He mimics the incident, pointing out the offending jut on the bottom of the chair.

“And I went to sit down, and I hit it there as I was falling, just like that,” he says. “And my hand, I reached back to try to prevent it. And then I proceeded to fall and put all of my weight on the chair. I wish I had a more gruesome, cool football story. But no, just my own stupidity.”

Week 11

The Eagles return to work on Monday following their week off. Some players used the bye to jet off for a quick vacation or to rehab injuries. Kelce, with a six-week-old daughter at home, mostly just sat around. He also celebrated his 32nd birthday.

“I did absolutely nothing,” he says. “I used to come in and get a lift, maybe go on the pool or the treadmill. I was contemplating going into the pool in the house and swimming, but I didn’t.”

As a result, Kelce is especially sore after the first two days of practice. He thinks “there’s something wrong” with his right shoulder.

“It’s just kind of swollen,” he says. “Honestly, there’s probably five or six of those throughout my body right now. It’s just more noticeable because it’s recent.”

As for the cut on his hand from the chair incident, it’s not pretty.

“It kind of looks infected, doesn’t it?” Kelce says. “Unless it starts itching, it’s probably all right.”

A hard lesson to learn: Never mess with a folding chair. (Bo Wulf / The Athletic)

Week 12

The Eagles fall to 5-5 after a loss at home to the Patriots.

Kelce’s shoulder still hurts. His ribs are tender to the touch after a pass-rusher from his blindside ran into him with an elbow or helmet — he’s not sure which. And one of his fingernails is starting to come off, “so that’ll be just something annoying.”

The 6-foot-3 Kelce says his in-season weight typically vacillates between 285 and 290 pounds, and occasionally creeps closer to 295. He already has a post-career plan for his weight, which is to drop down into the 250s within his first year out of the game and then lose 10 more pounds each decade in the years that follow. That plan factors in both his long-term health and a little bit of vanity.

“I think I’d look very weird if I was under 250 right away,” he says.

Kelce has talked with former players who say their hips, knees and backs all feel markedly better after the post-career weight loss, although there’s also a “weird period where your body feels worse for a little bit when you stop playing, and then it feels better.” He’s also looking forward to training in a different way.

“There’s not a need to be ridiculously explosive and hang-clean over 300 pounds,” he says. “Snatching up 200 pounds, all of these things that kind of put wear on the body, I’ll probably put to the side. Although knowing me, I probably won’t be able to put it fully to the side.”

Diet-wise, Kelce has fiddled with everything during his nine-year career — from intermittent fasting, cutting way down on carbs to cutting out meat entirely for a week here or there, though some of those changes are usually confined to the offseason. In-season, he used to be stricter. Now, “I try to just eat clean as much as possible,” he says, which means avoiding anything processed or deep-fried. But like head coach Doug Pederson, he has his weaknesses.

“I used to eat a tub of ice cream almost every night. I love ice cream,” he says. “I don’t eat ice cream before games anymore. Or at least I try not to. Every once in a while I’ll slip up. I just feel like crap the next morning when I eat it, even though it’s by far my favorite dessert. I don’t have a sweet tooth. I’m not a big candy guy. I’m more a fried foods (guy). That’s my guilty pleasure. There’s nothing I like more than fried chicken.”

Week 13

The Eagles lose again, this time at home to the Seahawks. They’re a disappointing 5-6.

Kelce says his shoulder is actually feeling a lot better and his hands are sore. That’s about it.

Meanwhile, he has played every offensive snap. His streak of 85 consecutive games played is the longest for any active center. He hates being reminded of that, not because he thinks it will jinx his longevity but because he doesn’t think there’s any good reason he has been so durable.

“I think it’s luck,” he says. “I am way out of the long side of probably what you should be doing each and every week. We have guys that do stretching and yoga and massages. I do a massage once a week (on Friday), and that’s pretty much it.

“There are guys who will literally go from practice right into the weight room to foam-roll right into the cold or hot tubs to do those, right from there to do a massage. Then, instead of going home, they go to do acupuncture. And I don’t know whether they want it more than me or not, but if I had to do that to play football? I don’t think I would do it. I think I would just find something else. Like, we have our recovery days where the staff will really want you to go recover, physically. If we’re not gonna lift, at least go do something to recover, right? And I say, ‘I’m recovering my mind.’ I’m gonna do absolutely nothing. Not even think about football for the next 45 minutes because all I’m doing all day every day — especially in training camp, which is when this happens. Like, in training camp, all I’m doing all day is bogging my mind down and doing nothing but football. I think there’s something to be said for literally doing nothing. I think that that’s in itself a recovery. … I don’t have science to back that up, though.”

Then again, Kelce has tried pretty much everything.

On acupuncture: “There’s a guy that a lot of guys go to. … I hate that they call it acupuncture, because it’s not acupuncture. … I had a sports hernia and as you can imagine, you injure your core, these muscles start to get overworked back here, right? So I’m trying all these things and I’m like, ‘None of this is working.’ And the guy comes in … brings out a needle, not an acupuncture needle, a needle with medication in it. OK? And he says, ‘OK, where do you feel sore at?’ And I tell him, here and all this stuff in my back. And all he does, it’s called procaine, I think, but all he does, essentially it’s some type of pain inhibitor or dulling medication, and he just starts putting little bits of it around these nerves where the pain is. And he asks me, ‘How’s your back feel?’ ‘Well, you just numbed it up with a bunch of fuckin’ medicine. It feels a lot better.’ So, like, all these guys, ‘Oh God, this acupuncture’s real good.’ I’m like, ‘Dude.’ Anyways, whatever works for you. I’d rather just take a systemic like an anti-inflammatory.”

On yoga: “I hate yoga. Matter of fact, the only times, knock on wood, the only times I’ve ever pulled muscles, so like strains or muscle tears, have been during times that I’ve been doing rigorous stretching exercises. When I was younger, I used to pull my groin all the time. And thinking back to it, we would do this vigorous stretching before, not dynamic stretching, static stretching. In college, again, I pulled my groin. I was doing a course, just so happened I was doing a yoga course, which was one credit over the summer, just to take time. ‘Oh, this is probably good for me!’ Yeah, tear it. So, I think some people, I’ve always been notoriously inflexible. I think some people are flexible. Like if that works for you, it works. But for me, I’ve found that the more I stretch before exercise, I have a greater chance of straining a muscle. Whereas I like dynamic warmups, which would be like your high knees. Just do a couple squats. Just move around, get my hips ready to go. In the weight room, we’ll do like a 10-minute foam-roll session, and to be honest, to squat, all I need to do is go in there, start off with a small amount of weight, do a squat, just keep adding weight.”

On foam-rolling: “Foam-rolling, to me, is a simple cost-benefit analysis that I can’t — the amount of relief you get from foam-rolling is less than the energy and time spent doing it.”

On cupping: “Tried that. Cupping’s not bad actually. But I don’t think cupping is like, I think cupping is good for some things. Very superficial things. It’s not gonna get anything super down, but it’s gonna loosen a lot of superficial soft tissue.”

On going to the chiropractor: “Cupping or foam-rolling or, like, chiropractic stuff, all of these things are short-term things that aren’t really getting to the root of the issue, right? So, like, you go to a chiropractor, crack your back, you feel better for maybe two minutes and it’s like, I’m pretty much right back to the way I felt before that. My favorite thing, every time I’ve ever been to a chiropractor, almost every single time, they ask me, ‘You feel better now?’ And I would say, 90 percent of the time, I just tell them, ‘Yes,’ so that I can leave. It’s like, ‘Oh how’s your ankle feel? In my head I’m like, ‘It feels exactly the same.’ I’m just tired of doing this. ‘Yeah, it feels better.’”

What’s the secret, then, to Kelce’s longevity?

“I’m a big believer in Advil,” he says. “I’m a big believer in moving. Dynamic. … Unless you have a true tear, if it’s a bruise, if you feel tight, nothing is better than actually going out and moving around. Because that’s gonna get everything pumping, all of the blood flow moving. I think diet can be a huge benefit. It’s just sometimes you want a pizza.”

Kelce stretches during minicamp practice. He says he’s “notoriously inflexible.” (Matt Rourke / AP)

Week 14

The Eagles’ season hits rock bottom after a shocking loss in Miami. At 5-7, they’re left for dead, which is appropriate because Kelce felt like death on Sunday morning.

A few days prior, during Thanksgiving dinner, he noticed a sore throat. By the time he got off the team flight Saturday afternoon, Kelce’s cold had gotten much worse.

“I didn’t get a lot of sleep,” Kelce says a few days later, in between heavy sniffs of snot. “Tossing and turning, runny nose all over the place. It was all head-related. Nothing stomach. No diarrhea. Just a really bad cold. I usually don’t even notice colds. It was weird. It was one of them that was just, I can’t remember the last time I had a cold that was that bad.

“It really started the night before and then carried over to game day. And then on game day, you take all the anti-inflammatories. … Pretty much did the trick. I was really out of it before the game, but by the time the game was going, I was ready to go.”

To make matters worse, Kelce’s right foot is still acting up. Remember when he was stepped on eight weeks ago? There’s a pain since then that still hasn’t gone away. He doesn’t feel it when he’s running or run-blocking, but rather when his weight is fully anchored in pass protection, “getting ready to be powerful.” After the Dolphins game, Kelce gets an X-ray on the foot, which shows no structural damage.

“It doesn’t really bother me. It comes and goes,” he says. “I thought it was just like a bruise, and I think it still is, a bone bruise or who knows what. I just know that occasionally it’s been bothersome. (The X-ray) was more of a preventative, ‘Let’s take a look and make sure there’s not anything there.’ ‘That shouldn’t probably still be hurting you’ type thing.”

Week 15

On “Monday Night Football,” the Eagles rally from a 17-3 halftime deficit to beat the Giants in overtime and temporarily save their season.

For Kelce, the win comes at a cost. Early in the second quarter, on a third-and-1, running back Jay Ajayi carries the ball up the middle before he’s stalled near the first-down marker. As Ajayi tries to keep pushing, Kelce joins in to help move the pile. When he then tumbles to the ground, his left quad lands directly on Ajayi’s cleat. On the All-22 film, you can see Kelce get up from the pile and do a little hop on his left leg as tight end Zach Ertz notices Kelce is hurt.

Kelce never missed a snap against the Giants — a season-high 85 for the offense — but the deep thigh bruise is affecting the structure of his week, which is already different because of the Monday-to-Sunday turnaround.

The treatment for the quad is mostly compression and ice. The usual recommendation is for Kelce to sleep with his knee bent past 90 degrees, but he and the training staff agree that simply elevating the leg to minimize the swelling will be fine.

“Again, this comes back to what’s better,” Kelce says. “Is the extra, you know, 20 percent flexion better? Or is getting a good night’s sleep better?”

The treatment on his quad also means Kelce has to spend more time in the training room than he would like.

“This is, for lack of a better term, an injury. An acute injury. And when you have acute injuries, you need to go get treatment,” he says. “But I just think there’s a fine line, in my opinion, between going into a training room too often and like a subtle, psychological, like if you are constantly going in there for little tiny things, you start to give these little tiny things more power over you. I think (it’s better) when you kind of just succumb to the fact that you’re going to feel like shit and like, just realize that this is part of the game.”

Kelce says he has his uncle, Don Blalock, who played college football at Miami (Ohio) and Purdue, to thank for that mentality.

“He told me really early on, very unscientifically, he said there was a study back when he was playing — which I have never looked up to see if this is a factual statement — but as a young child whose uncle played college football, I kind of just believed him, that guys who stay in the training room are more likely to be injured,” Kelce says. “I think the more you go into the training room, the more you become self-aware. ‘Oh man, I gotta go get this worked on. I need to have this massaged. I need to have this.’ Whereas the guys that stayed out of the training room generally, he’s like, ‘I don’t know what you guys are doing, but most of the guys I saw, once they went in that training room, they never came out.’ And I think as I’ve gone through the league, as I’ve been here, I think there’s a lot of truth to that.”

There’s a more important result of Kelce’s injury. In order to lessen the bruising, he has to stop taking anti-inflammatories during the week.

Week 16

The Eagles’ road win over Washington pulls them back to 7-7, setting up a de facto NFC East championship game with the Cowboys.

Kelce utters a combination of sentences you don’t hear often: “Nothing new. My fingernails continue to get ripped off.”

The truth, though, is Kelce’s worried about his body for the first time this season. The week off of anti-inflammatories unearthed a lot of hidden pain.

“My quad that I had the bruise on felt fine during the game. But all week, everything that I didn’t know or wasn’t thinking about manifested itself,” he says. “It didn’t feel great during the game. My core and my back were the two main things that kind of just lingered. And my knee, which I haven’t really been struggling with, I think that popped up a little bit, too. My hands during the week felt like shit, but during the game, they felt fine. It was a rough week for practice. It’s much better right now. I can still feel my back. It’s weird because, usually, my back’s perfectly fine. But the last couple weeks, my back’s been pretty tight.”

Still, this is a far cry from 2018, when Kelce played through a partially torn MCL, a fully torn UCL, a broken toe and nonstop knee pain before the fabella discovery. He acknowledges that string of injuries was the biggest reason he seriously contemplated retirement last offseason.

“This year, it’s kind of more just been really, really fortunate,” he says, “just a lot of little things that probably aren’t gonna go away. Kind of a different mindset.”

The good news is the end of the season offers Kelce an opportunity to play in the cold weather.

“I love the cold,” he says. “Big fan of the cold. Most heavy guys are. For me, I just don’t wanna get tired during the game, and if it’s hot, you fatigue. If it’s cold, you’re not going to fatigue. When it’s cold outside, I feel like I can literally play nonstop.”

This time, Kelce actually has the science to back it up, citing a Stanford study in which a cooling glove allowed subjects to increase their athletic performance.

“I don’t know if it’s that scientific,” he says. “I just know when it’s cold I don’t get tired.”

Week 17

The Eagles upset the Cowboys at home and now need only to defeat the lowly Giants to win the NFC East.

Kelce is still feeling the ramifications of the week without anti-inflammatories. His left hip and back are really sore.

His offensive linemate Lane Johnson has missed the last two games with a high-ankle sprain and is trying to return to the lineup. Kelce tells the story of the one high-ankle sprain he suffered in his career, back in college.

“I tried to play the next week,” Kelce says, “and the first play we called was like an outside zone to the left, and I went outside and just kept going in a big circle to the sidelines and didn’t come back.”

He says the high-ankle sprain ranks near the top of the most painful injuries he’s ever suffered, but stingers are probably the worst. Fortunately, those happened when he played linebacker, which was a long time ago.

Kelce leaves the field after beating the Giants to wrap up a playoff berth. (Steven Ryan / Getty Images)

Playoffs, round 1

After beating the Giants, the Eagles prepare for a playoff rematch at home against the Seahawks.

Kelce is starting to wonder if there is something wrong with his back and left hip.

“Tried to squat this week and something’s going on,” he says midweek. “I don’t know. I’ll probably get an MRI after the season to see if there’s anything structurally in there. But I would assume it’s probably not. I would assume it’s just some sort of strain. It’s just weird because it’s not getting better. It was really bad before the Washington game. I didn’t feel that bad after the game. Whereas the last two games, after them, especially today, usually after you lift, it kind of gets better. It kind of hasn’t gotten better today.”

Kelce and the trainers tried alternating between the cold pool and hot pool, hoping the contrast baths would help flush something out. They tried “soft tissue active release techniques” to alleviate the pain. But neither method has helped much, and Kelce assumes everything is probably connected to the sports hernia from five years ago. A problem with the core affects everything around it, even if he’s only feeling those effects because they had a window to become inflamed three weeks ago.

Oh, and his hands, beaten up from 16 games, are “better today than they were three days ago.”

Later in the week, Kelce is named as the All-Pro center for the third straight season, an accomplishment that places him in rare company. With three All-Pros and three Pro Bowls, plus the boost from his prominent role in a Super Bowl championship, he belongs in the discussion as a potential Hall of Famer.

This, to him, is ridiculous.

“It’s hard to imagine the Hall of Fame stuff,” he later says. “Any of these individual awards, it’s just, there’s very few guys that in my opinion are scheme-independent players. These are guys that really belong in the Hall of Fame. Your Fletcher Cox, your Jason Peters. The guys that no matter who coached them or what team they played on, were gonna be unbelievable talents. And that’s not the player I am. … For me, I excel because I have a certain amount of strengths that I’m very good at. But I also have weaknesses that I have as a player, that I’m always trying to get better and overcome. And luckily, I have a set of coaches and a coach in Jeff Stoutland and a coach in Doug Pederson that utilize me and I get to utilize those strengths. So I think, you know, that’s the big difference in that realm. My personal philosophies, I guess.”

It’s clear the pursuit of individual accolades will have no bearing on his decision whether to play beyond this season.

Kelce prepares to snap the ball in the Eagles’ wild-card loss to the Seahawks. (Julio Cortez / AP)

The offseason

The Eagles’ season abruptly ends with a home playoff loss to Seattle, thanks in large part to a first-quarter concussion suffered by Carson Wentz. Of the Eagles’ 11 offensive starters back in Week 1, only Kelce and Seumalo started and finished all 17 games.

In the postgame locker room, after he’s done commiserating with teammates and coaches, Kelce removes his cleats and tape and notices something off about the bottom of his foot when he starts to walk. He’s worried there’s a plantar fascia strain, so he goes in for an on-site MRI. The results are good, nothing to worry about.

On Monday, he undergoes another MRI, this one on the hip that’s been bothering him down the stretch. Again, there’s nothing new, but the results ease Kelce’s mind. He still thinks the hip and back pain are probably related to the three-day stretch he went without anti-inflammatories, but he acknowledges that’s only one idea. It’s also possible he strained his core some other way or there’s a hit he can’t remember taking or it was just the cost of another season’s worth of football. Sometimes, there are no answers.

This offseason, he’ll fully cycle off the anti-inflammatories to really assess the state of his body. That should also help him determine whether surgery to remove the fabella is necessary since Kelce acknowledges there’s probably not any one thing causing his chronic knee pain. He and the training staff have developed a routine that allows Kelce to feel good during practice and games, so it might not be worth it to mess with what’s working. He’ll probably end up getting a few more MRIs across his body just in case, but he doesn’t expect any other surgeries.

Despite all that, Kelce says he feels “pretty good.”

“It’s one of the healthier seasons I’ve had,” he says. “I mean, knock on wood, other than the last four games, I didn’t play a lot of games with pain during the week, which makes the season go by a lot easier for a player.”

Last offseason, after Kelce chose to return for another year, Stoutland and the Eagles thought it would be beneficial for Kelce’s health to give him some time off during the season. The plan was to not have him practice on Wednesdays. After sitting out a few pre-planned “rest days” in training camp, Kelce knew that plan wasn’t going to last.

“I hated every second of it,” Kelce says. “I didn’t like being on the sideline. I didn’t like guys asking me what was wrong and then me having to say, ‘Oh, nothing. I’m just old.’ It didn’t feel right. And then, also, I think the center position is such a critical position to be on the field practicing.”

Kelce played either the most or second-most regular-season offensive snaps of any player in the NFL, depending on whether you count penalties. He did it with a bum hip, a balky shoulder, an aching back, busted hands and barking feet. And because enduring pain is such a fundamental job requirement of playing football for a living, Kelce was listed on the Eagles’ injury report only once all season — when he missed a Wednesday practice for “personal reasons.” In this case, the birth of his daughter.

After following the arc of the season, there are two questions left for Kelce. The first is the one he knows is coming. Was this his final season?

“I’ll put it this way,” he says. “I feel better health-wise than I did at the end of last year. So I feel good about that. I still feel like I can play at a high level and still feel like I have a lot to offer from a football perspective. And I still very much want to play football. So there’s a lot of things trending in a positive way. But again, I said this last year, I’m gonna step back and evaluate everything. … I want to get completely off of the anti-inflammatories and get completely away from training to really see where my body feels and how good it feels and reassess. So I guess that’s probably where I’m at with that.”

This week, Kelce and his family will enjoy the Pro Bowl in Orlando, Fla., after a brief jaunt to Kansas City to watch his brother, Travis – who has missed only one game himself over the last six seasons – win the AFC Championship Game. Then he’ll go root for Travis in the Super Bowl, as Travis did for him two years ago. After that, he’ll give his body time to heal and cycle off the anti-inflammatories. Then, as with blocking schemes and everything else, he’ll thoughtfully consider the options. His passion for the game remains.

Which leads to the final question. Every day, Kelce feels the effects of a lifetime playing football. Sometimes that means struggling to fall asleep or letting out an unexpected wince when bending over. There’s sure to be more where that came from.

Is it, or was it, worth it?

“In general, the fact that I’ve taken years off my knees, back and hips to play a game?” he says, pausing. “I love it, man. I think, obviously, everything comes at a cost. And to do anything really well or at the top of your field, whether it’s a business or football or whatnot, you’re gonna have things that are gonna be a cost, whether it’s time with your family and friends or your community. There’s so many positives from the sport. There’s so many positives of playing a team game at the highest level of the world with guys, like-minded guys who are equally driven and equally have the will to win and succeed that you do. To quite literally go out there and do it with your own hands and everything that you were born with, and that you’ve created yourself and with the help of a lot of people and coaches along the way, it’s a surreal feeling to be able to have done that.”

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