PHILADELPHIA – Jason Kelce stood at his locker and answered about 30 minutes of questions from reporters as the Philadelphia Eagles cleaned out their lockers on Wednesday following Monday night’s season-ending playoff loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Before beginning his interview odyssey, the veteran center said he wouldn’t be taking any retirement questions but would answer anything else anybody had for him.
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The cat may have been let out of the bag a bit when it was leaked that Kelce told some teammates that he was going to retire following the defeat in Florida.
The past couple of years, as he flirted with retirement, Kelce said he would probably do something big when he announced that he was done playing the game. Maybe something a little “Mummerish,” perhaps?
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Maybe that day will come sooner rather than later.
Right now, though, he has some other things on his mind over the next couple of weeks.
“That’s one of the beauties of the offseason,” he said. “It’s unscheduled. Obviously, my brother (Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis) is still in the playoffs. I don’t get to watch him very often. Maybe I’ll get an opportunity to watch one of those games this week. Pro Bowl is coming up, so got that.”
Ah, the Pro Bowl. Kelce has a chance to play in it. Will he?
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“I don’t even know what you do at the Pro Bowl anymore,” he said. “It’s down in Orlando, so I get to take my kids and maybe go to Walt Disney World. Not off to the Super Bowl Walt Disney World, but as long as (daughter) Wyatt gets to see Elsa, I don’t think it really matters. We’ll figure all that out.”
Perhaps playing a role in Kelce’s decision to retire will be trying to go out on a better note than the sour one that played out this season. Of course, there are no guarantees the Eagles can give him a second ring if he returns next year when he turns 37 during his 14th season.
He was asked if he knows why now, after trying to do it, it is so difficult for teams who lose the Super Bowl to return the next year, and he said it wasn’t anything he probably didn’t already know.
“It’s hard to go the Super Bowl, whether you went there the year before or not,” he said. “Only two teams out of 32 go. I think there are a lot of reasons. It’s hard to have two teams back-to-back years that are that good collectively.
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“Whenever you go to a Super Bowl, everybody’s going to be trying to take people on your staff, take players on your staff, take plays that you’re doing. Everybody’s looking at what you’re doing offensively to have success, so it’s hard to have that repeat success year after year.
“I think there are a lot of things that factor in. There’s luck, a lot of things that go into going to a Super Bowl. I don’t think I learned any of that this past year, I think that’s just kind of how it is.”
Some of the next few days will be spent thinking about how the season ended, an outcome that Kelce called disappointing.
“Whenever you get to this day, you’re having exit meetings, you’re talking about a lot of ideas and things that could have made the outcomes different, improved performances, fixed the offenses,” he said.
“We had a lot of those discussions. And obviously, it’s a very under-performing season for me as a whole. We didn’t live up to the potential that we had. It’s a frustrating close on a probably even more frustrating season.”
