By LeArchitecto @ Adobe Stock
The offensive line of the Philadelphia Eagles is huge, and Joshua Robinson, Andrew Beaton, and Rosie Ettenheim of The Wall Street Journal say, “they are out to flatten the Kansas City Chiefs.” They write:
For most of this NFL season, Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley has looked like a one-man highlight reel.
He’s led his team to the Super Bowl. He’s sprinted for over 2,000 yards. He once jumped over a defender backwards.
But Barkley’s heroics are hardly a solo project. If it seems like he’s always bursting into daylight, it’s only because the offensive line showing him the way happens to be the biggest group of wrecking balls in the history of this game.
Offensive linemen are typically the largest players in football, but even by those standards, the Eagles are positively ginormous. Their five starting linemen, on average, stand at 6-foot-6 and weigh 338 pounds. By comparison, they’re more than an inch taller, and 26 pounds heavier, than their counterparts on the Kansas City Chiefs.
In fact, Philadelphia’s starters make up the tallest and heaviest offensive line in Super Bowl history.
It means that as the Chiefs try to win their third consecutive title, they don’t just have to keep up with Barkley’s breakneck speed and lightning-fast moves. They also have to avoid being flattened by the most daunting collection of man-mountains this game has ever seen.
“They scout some big guys around here,” Eagles offensive tackle Lane Johnson says.
To understand what makes those big guys such enormous outliers, it helps to look at two of Philadelphia’s stars on the offensive line. The first is Jordan Mailata, who is so huge that he looks like he should be playing an entirely different sport—which he did. The 6-foot-8, 365-pound Australian was a promising rugby league player in Sydney before the Eagles took a flier on him in the seventh round of the 2018 NFL draft. This year, he was a second-team All-Pro.
The other is Mekhi Becton, who is large enough to support three different size-based nicknames: Big Ticket, Highway 77, and Mount Becton. He was drafted in the first round by the New York Jets to play tackle in 2020, but struggled with his fitness as his weight ballooned to 400 pounds. Since joining the Eagles on a one-year contract last spring, the 6-foot-7, 363-pound Becton has slimmed back and found a home at right guard, where he blasts open gaps for Barkley.
“I like unusual players,” said Eagles line coach Jeff Stoutland. “If you’re really big and long and hard to get around, and I put two or three or four guys next to each other like that, then how the heck are you going to squeak your way through?”
Read more here.
If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for my free weekly email.
