Jason Peters - Philadelphia Eagle

Started by mikey418, April 17, 2009, 01:43:55 PM

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ice grillin you

jpete is right there as the goat anyway but if he plays this year at even a good level he becomes unquestioned...none of the other goat candidates played at 36 and most I think got out at 32 or 33
i can take a phrase thats rarely heard...flip it....now its a daily word

igy gettin it done like warrick

im the board pharmacist....always one step above yous

SD

From camp reports he's back to playing like his old self. I can see a situation where they start signing him to one year deals until he retires. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Diomedes

lump in my gut when I log to find this thread bumped...relieved to find it's just some circle jerking and not bad news

Peters is a football king, will be first ballot without a doubt in my mind.
There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." - Yosemite Park Ranger

Rome

Settle down, Nancy.  No one is disputing his greatness.  Just asking if he's Ali.  No shame in him being Larry Holmes. 

hbionic

LOL at Dio and the lump in his throat.

I thought the same thing. I was saying, "farg...." as I was opening the thread.
I said watch the game and you will see my spirit manifest.-ILLEAGLE 02/04/05


Don Ho

Quote from: AO1 on August 04, 2018, 08:20:22 AM
He's the most dominant lineman I've ever seen and certainly the best Eagles lineman I've ever seen. For bias reasons and because I've watched every game he's played for the Birds I'd say he's the GOAT. I've never seen a player completely collapse one side of the field. It would be unfair to compare him to other tackles over the last 30 years (Munoz, Roaf, Pace, Ogden come to mind) because we didn't watch every snap of every game they played. Lineman don't make highlight films so you don't get to appreciate their body of work unless you've watched them on a regular basis.

^^^ :yay ^^^
It is amazing to watch if you ever focused on Peters during a game, he mauled people and it was sheer joy to watch.
"Well where does Jack Lord live, or Don Ho?  That's got to be a nice neighborhood"  Jack Singer(Nicholas Cage) in Honeymoon in Vegas.

ice grillin you

hard to explain how good this is....just read....

QuoteWho is Jason Peters, the Eagles' most interesting man? 'He won't start anything, but he'll finish it'

After​ the spraying of champagne and​ the swigging of Scotch,​ after the hugs​ and​ the​ "I love​ you,​​ mans," after the group pictures and the livestreams, after the coach's speech, after the interviews, after the "Dreams and Nightmares," after the showers and after the outfit changes, one person claimed the responsibility of carrying the Lombardi Trophy from the Eagles' Super Bowl LII locker room in Minneapolis to the team buses.

It wasn't Nick Foles, the game's MVP. It wasn't Doug Pederson, who out-coached the Patriots' Bill Belichick on the game's biggest stage. It wasn't Zach Ertz, who caught the game-winning touchdown pass, or Brandon Graham, who made the game's biggest play. It wasn't anyone who played or coached that night.

Instead, decked out in a "Super Bowl Champions" T-shirt, an Eagles jacket and hat, with a cigar dangling from his mouth, a gold chain draped over his chest and sunglasses on tight, Jason Peters cradled the sport's most valuable piece of hardware as if it had belonged to him forever. He hadn't played a snap since Week 7.

Since arriving in Philadelphia in 2009, Peters has grown from Pro Bowler to future Hall-of-Famer, from perceived malcontent to locker-room leader. Along the way, he's become something of a mythical figure around the Eagles' organization. In order to understand the aura that surrounds Peters, The Athletic talked to current and former teammates, coaches and members of the Eagles' front office. Though Peters did not respond to an interview request for this story, it turns out everybody has a Jason Peters story, whether or not they're willing to go on the record.

In April 2009, the Eagles acquired Peters in a trade with the Buffalo Bills. For what they got in return, the cost of three draft picks was a relative pittance.

Five years earlier, Peters was an undrafted rookie tight end on the Bills' practice squad who caught the eye of the Eagles' 29-year-old director of football administration. Back then, the Eagles could have had him for much less.

"Very early in Howie (Roseman's) tenure, he came in my office," says Joe Banner, the team president at the time. "And he said, 'There's this guy on Buffalo who's on their practice squad, who they're kind of using as a lineman and I think he's good. Maybe we should try to take him off their practice squad."

As Banner remembers, he and Roseman then sat down to watch the film on Peters. Banner was quickly smitten, too.

"For whatever reasons at the time, we kind of presented the idea and the roster spot just wasn't available and maybe other people weren't as enthused as we were," Banner says. "And so it passed. But now he was on our radar."

By 2009, Peters had established himself among the league's best left tackles with a pair of Pro Bowl berths. Peters and his agent, Eugene Parker, were angling for a new contract with the Bills that reflected that status, and Buffalo was unwilling to meet those demands. After all, contrary to his Pro Bowl-reputation, Peters surrendered 11.5 sacks in 2008.

"I went back to Howie and Andy (Reid) at the time and said, you know, 'Should we see if we can take advantage of this dispute?'" Banner says. "Andy wasn't sure because he just was pessimistic it would actually work. And Howie was like, 'Oh yeah, we should do that.' And anyway, the outcome of that was let's at least reach out to the Bills and see if we can talk to the agent and get a sense of what the agent would be looking for in the deal and what the Bills would be looking for."

Several days' worth of phone calls later, the Eagles learned the Bills were open to trading Peters, and they agreed with Parker on the basic structure of a potential new deal for his client. Now, they needed to investigate whether Peters would be the right fit, on and off the field.

Because any player embroiled in a contract dispute can be lazily labeled as "me first," Banner reached out to the agents of several of Peters' teammates on the Bills' offensive line. Reid made similar calls to friends either on the Bills' coaching staff or familiar with the Bills' locker room.

"Everything that came back was positive or good or neutral," Banner says. "I mean, there was nothing. No red flags, no yellow flags, nothing."

As for Peters' relatively lackluster performance the year prior, Reid tasked then-offensive line coach Juan Castillo with finding an explanation. Castillo was blown away by the athleticism of the 6-foot-4 dancing bear. He also noticed Peters was not consistently getting his hips "square" to the line of scrimmage in pass protection.

'"Then what you're gonna have to do is change his technique, right?'" Castillo remembers Reid telling him. "I said, 'Yeah, coach.' 'You're gonna have to teach him to set square.' I said, 'Yeah, coach.' Boom, done, and he made the trade. I still remember that like it was yesterday."

In charge of the trade negotiations, Banner put the finishing touches on the deal.

Initially, the Bills asked for both of the Eagles' first-round picks (they had acquired an extra by trading out of the first round the previous year). Over a few days, the Bills eventually accepted the Eagles' offer of first- and fourth-round picks in 2009 and a 2010 sixth-round pick. For the Bills, those selections turned into center Eric Wood, tight end Shawn Nelson and linebacker Danny Batten. For the Eagles, Peters would arguably become the team's most important player over the next decade. Ten years later, he's the only member of the 2009 Eagles still on the team.

"Truthfully, we underestimated what we were getting," says Banner. "We didn't think we were getting a leader. We just thought we were getting a solid guy who would be fine and had a ton of talent. We ended up getting a guy with this work ethic and competitiveness and leadership skills that we hadn't even anticipated."

With a new team and a new contract, Peters reported for duty in Philadelphia. Castillo remembers a driven Peters immediately embracing his technique changes. He also remembers that Peters' first practice as an Eagle ended in memorable fashion.

"I came to minicamp and went to practice in the indoor and was battling Trent Cole for the first time," Peters recalled in 2017. "And I crushed him all practice. It was about an hour-and-45-minute practice, but in the indoor (practice bubble) you sweat a lot. So I crushed him all practice and then, after practice, (Reid) called us up and I thought we were done. He's like, 'We've got 12 hash gassers.' So we start running the gassers, I got to about eight or nine and I fell out. When I opened my eyes, (Reid) was straddling over the top of me and he's like, 'Yeah, big fella, I'm gonna get you right. Don't worry about it.' That was one of my first moments with him that I remember."

Any concerns about Peters' personality and locker-room fit were quickly erased. His natural power and athleticism combined with a commitment to the craft to create the league's premier left tackle. Discounting the 2012 season he missed with a torn Achilles, Peters earned seven straight Pro Bowl berths from 2009-2016, including two years as a first-team All-Pro.

Along the way, he earned the nickname "The Bodyguard," which is both a convenient nickname for an offensive tackle and one befitting a player with a reputation of an enforcer. The most famous example of Peters taking care of that kind of business came in Sept. 2014 at Lincoln Financial Field, when Washington defensive lineman Chris Baker laid a blindside cheap-shot on Nick Foles. Peters reacted by steam-rolling toward Baker to deliver a few shots to the helmet of his own, and welcoming a fight with the entire opposing sideline. Peters was ejected. "I'd do it again," he said after the game. The message was clear.

"I was up close and personal. I was on the field," says Ertz. "He could have taken out their whole team by himself. ... You don't mess with that guy. He's gonna have everybody's back, whether it's your first year in the league or your 10th year."

Over the years, Peters has also been known to get into it — verbally and physically — within the confines of the team facility.

There was the time in the summer of 2011, after Castillo became defensive coordinator and was replaced as offensive line coach by Howard Mudd, who had a lifetime's worth of experience but also a wildly different set of techniques. Because those changes were made in the middle of a lockout, an entire offseason of adjustments had to be condensed into training camp. Peters initially resisted Mudd's style. Eventually, that disagreement came to a head with a memorable shouting match in the offensive line meeting room. Jason Kelce, then a rookie, remembers thinking, "What the hell? You can talk like this to coaches?"

But the steam boiling over ended up serving the greater good.

"Well, we kind of got angry at each other way back in training camp and maybe then, it's like, 'OK, you can stay mad if you want, but we're gonna do it this way.' And he bought in," Mudd says. "He bought in and that's what really matters."

Peters and Evan Mathis played next to each other along the line for three seasons. They formed, perhaps, the league's best guard-tackle tandem from 2013-2014, when they both went to consecutive Pro Bowls. But a former teammate described their personalities as "oil and water" and remembers one particularly heated practice in which the two were at odds over how to pass off defensive-line stunts. Shouting led to Peters delivering a forceful pass-set punch to Mathis' helmet. An entanglement followed before the coaches broke it up. Once again, it may have worked out for the best.

"In the meeting room after practice, they kind of hashed it out with one another," remembers the former teammate. "And that was it. And then they didn't have any more problems with it."

Most memorable may have been the aftermath of an otherwise inconsequential 2014 practice. Peters and occasionally maniacal special teamer Bryan Braman briefly got into it because Braman, on the scout-team defense, was perceived to be rushing too hard. There were only a few witnesses to what happened following practice in the trainer's room though the story immediately spread throughout the locker room. As players remember, Peters tried to apologize to Braman, who was too worked up to back down.

"JP's so chill. JP really don't want problems with anybody. Like, he won't start anything, but he'll finish it," remembers a player on the team at the time. "I just remember I was like, 'Man, this is a crazy man in Braman fighting Superman in JP.' I didn't know who to put my money on."

As legend goes, one punch from Peters was enough to end the fight, even if Braman later stormed through the locker room with a busted lip, yelling that he wasn't afraid of Peters.

And yet, Peters is still described mostly as a gentle giant. The extent of his loyalty is perhaps best explained through his relationships with the three men who have coached him in Philadelphia.

After their initial butting of heads, Peters and Mudd became close. Before meetings or in the hallway, Mudd would offer Peters a three-letter greeting: "H.O.F."

"I was pretty persistent," Mudd says. "So I think he responded to that, honestly. I think he knows he's a great athlete, that he's a great talent. So why not tell him what he is and act that way? The (two years) that I had with Jason, in front of my eyes, he transformed into something that you would dream about as a coach in terms of his buying in. ... He tried to get other people to buy into what we were doing, as a leader. As a coach, I really appreciated that. Because here's your best player trying to help other people buy into what we're doing."

Mudd says he and Peters occasionally text each other. After Super Bowl LII, Mudd sent his familiar refrain. "I keep saying it," he says. "I'd say it again if I saw him right now. I'd go up to him and say 'H.O.F.' and he'd smile."

Under Castillo, the Eagles' offensive line went through individual drills on the practice field about 30 minutes prior to practice — an unusual extra bit of effort compared to the league's standard operating procedure, but one Peters embraced.

"Once you have a person like that that leads by example, it's easy. The room's easy," Castillo says. "Very few people in the NFL that do 30 minutes of individual before practice. You figure a pro like that, really, what can you say? If he's doing 30 minutes of individual work before practice, what is everybody else gonna say?"

Castillo and Peters stay in close touch. When news broke earlier this offseason that he had been fired by the Bills, Castillo was moved by a text message of encouragement from Peters. In fact, Castillo says Peters later called former Eagles offensive coordinator Frank Reich to recommend Castillo for the Indianapolis Colts' open offensive line coach position.

"Once JP knows that he can trust you and you have his back, Jason Peters will always have your back," Castillo says. "Always."

And then there's Jeff Stoutland. When he was still coaching in college at Alabama, Stoutland used Peters' game film to illustrate ideal offensive line play. Now, after six years of coaching Peters under two different head coaches, Stoutland's former muse is a pupil and a friend. Peters displayed his affection and compassion for Stoutland in 2016 after the Stoutland's family dog, Cornell, died.

"JP, he said, 'All right, I'm gonna go try to get a dog just like Cornell,'" Stoutland's son Jake recalled to The Athletic's Sheil Kapadia. "So he sent some people out. This was during the season so he couldn't do it (himself). He had a picture of Cornell. And they searched the whole northeast for a dog. They found this dog that we have now. He gifted us this dog to help my dad. It was from him and the offensive line. But I believe it was JP's idea. He goes above and beyond. They have such a great relationship."

Leading by example is Peters' M.O., but that doesn't mean he's silent in the locker room. When he speaks, everyone listens. In addition to Peters' defense of Foles against Washington in 2014, Roseman fondly remembers a brief but impactful speech following a 2011 loss that dropped the team to 4-8. The gist: "Now we will find out who are the men and who are the boys, who will fight and who will not." The Eagles closed the season with four straight wins.

"We have a Hall of Fame player and a Hall of Fame person," Roseman said via email.

Arguably, Peters' most important role in the locker room is as the team D.J., a position he's held as long as anyone on the team can remember.

"He's the reason why I have to do this pre-game Omega (Psi Phi) Step every week," says Malcolm Jenkins. "When I first got here (in 2014) ... he's the locker room D.J., so he's playing all the music. He's like, 'I wanna see the Omega Step, man, go ahead.' He puts on that 'Atomic Dog.' So I did it. And then every single week, he made me do it and ... then it became a thing. Every single week since I've been an Eagle. And now it's just like, yeah, the team acts like they're not even ready to play until I do that."

Jordan Matthews remembers getting a surprising message after the 2015 season.

"JP just randomly texted me, like, 'J-Mo, what you up to?' I was like, 'Nothing, me and my bro, we just chilling.' He's like, 'Where yo address?' So I send him my address, he's like, 'All right, be ready in like 20.' I'm like, 'All right.' So me and my brother are standing outside, he pulls up and it's like a big party truck slash bus and I'm just like, 'Is this what he's picking us up in?' We walk in and it's like 10 people that we just don't know and JP's in the far back looking like the kingpin. We're just like, 'What?'

"And there's lights going, music playing, and he's like, 'J-Matt, what's good!' We go sit back there and he just played like, Louisiana bounce music, like soulful music, instrumentals and we started freestyling with all the people on the bus. He loves asking me to rap for him at all times," Matthews says. "We were just driving through Philly. It was crazy. I was partying with JP."

Other memories are more innocuous, like he and Nate Sudfeld going toe-to-toe and trading trash talk playing the locker room Pop-a-Shot or Peters' intimidating presence on the pool table. Teammates say he wins because he makes you nervous, not because he's that good. There were the years when Peters head-butted every player on gameday as they exited the locker room for the field. And there's the reverence for Peters' majestic and mysterious signature beard, which is better manicured than any surface in the league. No one knows how long it takes Peters, or whoever's in charge of that work of art, to make it ready for the day, but there's never a hair out of place or discolored.

To dwell on those legends, though, would be a disservice to the impact Peters has had on countless teammates. During his 10 seasons with the Eagles, Peters has embraced the role of veteran mentor. Off the field, one former teammate remembers Peters' indispensable advice about what seemed like the menial aspects of becoming a professional, like how to handle a 401K or why it was so important to opt into the added benefits offered through the Players Association. The team's elder statesman knew better than anyone that the game doesn't last forever.

On the field, Peters' willingness to work on technique after practice with young linemen and pass-rushers has become such second nature that it no longer registers as noteworthy. But every summer practice for the better part of the last decade has ended with Peters sticking around to help anyone from forgotten bottom-of-the-roster players like Malcolm Bunche and Michael Bamiro to Jordan Mailata, Halapoulivaati Vaitai and Lane Johnson, who have all been labeled along the way as Peters' eventual replacement.

Last year, as he was forced to watch from the sideline while his team marched to the Super Bowl, Peters split his time between rehabbing his torn ACL (where he joined the sizable cast of injured characters and served as the group's enforcer of fines) and coaching Vaitai, his replacement. Both Vaitai and Stoutland credited Peters throughout the second half of the season with imparting wisdom on the mindset and technique required for Vaitai to exceed. That process began on the cart that carried Peters off the field in Week 7 and ended with Peters emerging from the victorious locker room palming the Lombardi Trophy.

Peters and the Eagles have a decision to make this offseason.

Now 37, Peters is due $10.7 million in 2019. That's a reasonable rate for a starting left tackle, but in 2018, Peters' body was clearly no longer in mint condition. Though he started every contest, he missed significant snaps in four games. He played 79 percent of the team's snaps over the course of the season. He was good, not great. He wasn't Jason Peters.

In Vaitai and Mailata, the Eagles have a steady player with a borderline NFL starter floor and a lottery ticket with Pro Bowl upside, respectively. They also have three picks in the first two rounds of April's draft. Releasing Peters would save the Eagles $8 million. They could also restructure his contract or Peters could retire.

Then again, Peters was also playing in his first season after ACL and MCL tears. Perhaps, age be damned, his body will be in even better shape in 2019. The Eagles and Peters have faced similar crossroads before and have reunited every time.

However the two sides proceed, Peters' time in Philadelphia is, at the very least, nearing its end. Throughout this past season, while the rest of the team jogged through pre-practice warmups, Peters lay on his back while assistant athletic trainer Mark Lewis leaned his entire body into stretching a single tree trunk of Peters' lower body. At one point late in the season, Lewis was otherwise occupied, so the job of stretching Peters fell to Stoutland — much to the delight of the offensive linemen.

And though Peters remained steady in his roles as D.J. and veteran mentor, he took a step back from the forefront of the team's leadership, ceding his captaincy to Kelce. When he spoke to the media, it was typically while sitting on a stool in his locker after a game, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with his own cartoon likeness.

In many ways, Peters is the Eagles' "most interesting man." There are possibly apocryphal stories about his exploits behind the wheel of his many cars, or about his prowess as a high school phenom in both basketball and baseball in the small town of Queen City, Texas. Lore has it Peters has a growing list of personal Instagram accounts because every time he forgets a password, he just creates a new profile.

It's hard to envision anything beyond his capabilities, so who knows? Maybe Peters will return to Pro Bowl form after all.

What might surprise you about Peters is his sentimental side. He is a man who cares about his legacy and the prospect of a Hall-of-Fame future. He was unapologetic about his happiness following January's Wild Card round win over the Chicago Bears, the first playoff win of his career as an active participant. He's not afraid to look fondly at the past.

Graham is the second-longest tenured Eagle and perhaps Peters' closest friend on the team. As a pending free agent, he, too, faces an uncertain future in Philadelphia. Apparently, Peters has been a prolific documentarian during his time with the Eagles, and he surprises Graham every now and then with a trip down memory lane.

"He takes videos and stuff, man," Graham says. "He's got some old videos of me. I'm like, 'Dang, send me that.' On his phone. Just off the field, you know what I'm saying, on the bus, me and T. Cole listening to music in the back. ... Or like taking a picture of me eating in the morning in, like, 2011, like 'Dang, I forgot he used to always take pictures or video of, like, me eating, because I be smashing. ... He just be like, 'Man, look at all this shtein I got on my phone!' It's just funny when you go down memory lane, like, 'Dang I remember that.' It's crazy how fast time's flying. Chip (Kelly) was just, I was just in the room with Chip, I was just in the room with Andy (Reid). I can still smell some of that shtein (from training camp at Lehigh). So old up here."

Nearly a year after Peters exited an alcohol-soaked locker room carrying the sport's most sought-after prize, the Eagles' most recent season came to an end in New Orleans without a trophy. Peters opted not to speak to the media following the game. Instead, he and Isaac Seumalo sat on their stools and bemoaned the torn Achilles suffered by Brandon Brooks and the difficulty of the rehab ahead.

Four hours earlier, as the Eagles headed into the locker room following their on-field warmups, Peters jogged in a different direction. He made his way to the sideline with a beeline to Jeffrey Lurie, the team's owner, whom Peters once described as his "best friend." Presumably, both were keenly aware that this could be their final pre-game chat, but we'll never know what was said. It's more fun to imagine.
i can take a phrase thats rarely heard...flip it....now its a daily word

igy gettin it done like warrick

im the board pharmacist....always one step above yous

Diomedes

Something wrong with you?  Not hard to explain at all how good it is:  it's a cookie-cutter sports puff piece.  One cliche after another.  The talented guy who becomes a leader and knocks heads sometimes but everyone loves him in the end.  Never heard that before. 

Literally nothing new in this at all, just a lot of words.
There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." - Yosemite Park Ranger

ice grillin you

the player and franchise anecdotes about both the trade and peters himself are fantastic and never heard before....i feel like you read the first paragraph then stopped

its a phenomenal profile

only thing i hate is that this guy wasnt able to participate in the super bowl run....man that is going to go down as an all time sports regret
i can take a phrase thats rarely heard...flip it....now its a daily word

igy gettin it done like warrick

im the board pharmacist....always one step above yous

Diomedes

I honestly did not learn anything from reading that.  Already knew about Howie trying to get him from Buffalo practice squad from a similarly lengthy and mostly re-hashed profile of Howie.  I guess players telling how it's crazy that Peters has video of them eating is new.

Most sports writing isn't worth reading.  I'd rather read MDS predictions on broadcast schedules.
There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." - Yosemite Park Ranger

MDS

Zero hour, Michael. It's the end of the line. I'm the firstborn. I'm sick of playing second fiddle. I'm always third in line for everything. I'm tired of finishing fourth. Being the fifth wheel. There are six things I'm mad about, and I'm taking over.

ice grillin you

i love the idea of a "puff piece" on a lock first ballot hall of famer who might be a top 3 eagle of all time

is there a hit piece on JP out there somewhere?
i can take a phrase thats rarely heard...flip it....now its a daily word

igy gettin it done like warrick

im the board pharmacist....always one step above yous

General_Failure

Probably in a Buffalo newspaper from 2008 or 2009, sure.

The man. The myth. The legend.

Eagles_Legendz

He was on my flag football team in college.  Prejudices me negatively against reading anything he writes.

SD

Signed to a one year deal...assuming for less money