PHILADELPHIA — If Lane Johnson is the Eagles’ best offensive player, and if Jalen Hurts is their most important, and if A.J. Brown is their most exciting, what does that make Dallas Goedert?
The X-factor.
The Eagles have not lost a game this season that Hurts and Goedert have both started and finished. Say what you like about Johnson, the all-world right tackle, and Brown, the Birds’ best receiver since Terrell Owens, but no player has had a greater hand than Goedert in the Eagles’ offensive surge and Hurts’ MVP run.
If Goedert shines in Super Bowl LVII like tight ends have shined before him, his name will become a brand and the Eagles will have their best chance to beat the Chiefs.
Zach Ertz caught the game-winning touchdown pass for the Eagles in Super Bowl LII, offsetting a 15-catch, 116-yard, two-touchdown performance from Rob Gronkowski. Gronk had six catches for 87 yards the next season, when the Patriots won their last Super Bowl.
Travis Kelce caught six passes for 43 yards and a score in the Chiefs’ win in Super Bowl LIV, and Gronk came out of retirement to snag six for 67 and two scores for the Buccaneers in Super Bowl LV, while Kelce caught 10 for 133, but no scores.
Tight ends don’t always factor; neither team’s tight ends mattered much in last year’s Rams win over the Bengals. But tight ends can be back-breakers. They’re difficult to predict and they’re hard to guard, since the best are faster than linebackers and bigger than defensive backs. A tight end as a primary weapon can decide the outcome of the biggest game.
That’s how Gronk launched his retirement career as a TV host and insurance salesman. It’s how Kelce changed his image from pretty boy to superstar.
Both were stars before they got to where Goedert is now. He’s been in the league for five years. He’s paid: He’s in the first year of a $57 million deal that will keep him in Philly through 2025, the third-richest contract for a tight end.
But from Mike Ditka to Shannon Sharpe to Tony Gonzalez, tight ends can be football’s mega-personalities. A big play or two in Super Bowl LVII could put Goedert over the top. He knows it.
“Your life will never be the same,” Goedert said. “Whatever happens, my favorite thing in the world is playing football.”
Goedert realizes that being a star tight end in the NFL with a Super Bowl ring can do more than lengthen a career.
Sharpe parlayed his three Super Bowl rings and his outsize personality into a 20-year TV career. Kelce was a Pro Bowler by the time he starred on Catching Kelce in 2016, a TV show in which 50 women from 50 states vied for his affections, Bachelor-style (the winner didn’t last). By then, Gronk had been the subject of an erotica novel, and, a credit to his versatility, he would go on to host a show on Nickelodeon before setting into his current role as a mediocre analyst for NFL on Fox.
All of this one day could be his.
“Hopefully, if all that comes with it,” Goedert said, “I can stay the same person, keep on loving the game, and play for a long time.”
The goods
Goedert is tall and stooped and bearded. He talks with a soft, pleasant monotone, almost Western in its tenor and cadence.
That is where his gentleness ends. Ask Adoree’ Jackson.
Goedert stiff-armed the Giants cornerback on the third play of the NFC divisional game, an innocuous 9-yard gain that nevertheless set the tone for a 38-7 rout. “I landed one that I’d been waiting to land for a while,” he said afterward.
He averaged 7.6 yards after the catch this season, by far the best of any tight end for the second straight season, and he has longed to win the Angry Runs Scepter, awarded weekly by NFL Network analyst Kyle Brandt. He finally got it.
That wasn’t even his best play of the game — or even that drive.
Goedert snagged a one-handed, left-handed catch for a 16-yard catch-and-run that kick-started the Eagles’ playoff scoring avalanche. They’ve put up 69 points in two games.
He didn’t get much aerial action against the 49ers in the NFC championship game — five catches, 23 yards — but the best defense in the league made it a priority to muzzle him with Dre Greenlaw and Fred Warner, the best linebacker tandem in football. That’s OK. He was the fourth-best blocker among starting tight ends in football this season, and the fourth-best in overall grade, according to Pro Football Focus, and his contribution to the Eagles running game that bulldozed the Niners out of the playoffs was magnificent.
His grade probably would have been higher, but Goedert missed five games with a neck injury suffered on a missed face mask call early against the Commanders in Game 9, which the Eagles lost.
Goedert ranked No. 2 overall last season, when he caught just 56 passes for 830 yards and four touchdowns. He had 55 catches for 702 yards and three TDs this season.
If anyone ever needed a breakout playoff run, it’s Goedert.
Idol worship?
Goedert, 28, has trained with the 49ers’ George Kittle, 29, at the offseason “Tight End University” in Nashville since Kelce, 33, began it two years ago. Goedert impressed Kittle so much that Kittle in September called Goedert the most underrated tight end in the NFL. Then again, Goedert was an Advanced Placement student at the U.
“When I was in college, my favorite tight end was Kelce,” said Goedert, who walked on at FCS (I-AA) South Dakota State and became a two-time All- American, thanks, in part, to Kelce. “He does a great job finding the soft spot in zones. I took a lot of his stuff. Watched his film in college. Tried to implement it in our scheme.”
Weird. Kelce was just beginning his career when Goedert hit SDSU in 2013. Why not watch Gronk?
“Oh, I loved watching Gronk, too,” Goedert said with a defensive smile. “He shouldn’t take it personally. Gronk was the guy. Kelce? I just ended up watching him more because the Y-shovel [passes] we wound up putting in our offense, stuff like that.”
So, what if Goedert blows up on Super Bowl Sunday? Which off-the-field path would he prefer: sexy bachelor or goofy show host?
“I think I could fit into both,” Goedert said. “I think I would have more fun doing the Nickelodeon slime-type stuff. Loved watching that as a kid.”
Or not.
After all, he’s a South Dakota kid out of Britton-Hecla High, a two-town school that enrolls about 100 students from grades 9 to 12. After Philadelphia, and the Super Bowl, and the NFL, Goedert might want a break.
“You know,” he said, “I might just move to Wyoming. Get a little bit of land. Live off the grid for a while.”
