Saint KayBee
pretty good
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Thanks a bunch! I like that feature.
Best remaining Offensive Tackles Free agents, 2024 (1 Viewer)
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rlemieux
Who Dat?
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Here’s the real problem. We’re 1 injury away from Landon Young or Trevor Penning being our starter at LT.
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And what’s the odds of going 17 games without 1 injury? Scary comment.
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I actually like Davis and his versatility.
BensonJr
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I just hope that we don't call Howie, GM from Philly, and offer up our first round draft pick next year for an offensive lineman.
la. champ1
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Sadly you’re likely right.
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Jason Peters would instantly become the 4th best offensive lineman and the 2nd best OT on the team, even at 42 years old.
At 42 years old and with 20 years of experience in the league he's not going to put himself through the rigors of an NFL training camp at this point in his career.
However, he hasn't retired. Like last year, he's waiting for the season to start before signing with someone in need of help.
That most likely won't happen until after week 1 so that his salary won't be guaranteed for the full season.
He signed a minimum one year after week one last year with the Seahawks that paid him $1.165 Million.
He initially signed to the Seahawks PS. He was elevated late October.
He had played LT his entire NFL career after entering the league as an undrafted Tight End. However, in 2023 he appeared in 8 games at RT, starting 2 of them.
He hasn't had a holding penalty in the past 3 seasons and has only had 16 over his entire 20-year career while appearing in 221 games with 228 starts.
He might not be as good as he once was, but he's probably as good once as he ever was. Even at his age he may be a better option as a starter at RT than what the Saints have now and without a doubt, he would be better than any backup OT currently on the roster.
I say bring him in now. Sign him to the vet minimum with a few incentives based on playing time, game snaps, and starts. So what if you have to guarantee his salary in full if he's on the roster week one. By then you'll know if he's needed or not. We're talking vet minimum. He can ride the bike on the side while getting up to speed on the playbook. Give him limited reps in practice. Let him have plenty of Vet days between now and opening day. That's just 3 weeks away.
He's probably the best "swing tackle" option available at this point that could provide value and insurance without the Saints having to make a trade to acquire one.
Excerpts from an April 16, 2024 article by Bob Holt of Hog Sports as it appeared at wholehogsports.com
When Matt Jones and Jason Peters were University of Arkansas football teammates more than 20 years ago, they used to play pickup basketball games in the HPER Building during the offseason to help stay in shape.
“One game we had a fastbreak and Jason pointed up to the basket,” said Jones, who played quarterback. “I didn’t throw him the [alley] oop pass. He said, ‘C’mon Matt, what’s going on?
“I said, ‘Man, you can’t get up like that.” The 6-4 Peters weighed more than 300 pounds and had come to Arkansas as a defensive tackle.
“Jason was like, ‘You just throw the ball up there, I’ll get it,” Jones said. “So, it wasn’t two more times back down the court, and I threw him a lob, and it was to the top of the square on the backboard.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh, man. I threw it too far.’ But Jason just jumped up like [long-time NBA center] Hakeem Olajuwon and dunked. The whole place was shaking.
“Jason’s a freak athlete.”
Peters has used his freakish athleticism and work ethic to play 20 seasons in the NFL — all at offensive tackle since playing tight end as a rookie in 2004. His vertical jump was measured at 34 inches at the scouting combine.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if that guy plays for another decade, to be honest with you,” Jason Kelce, the Philadelphia Eagles’ center for 13 years before retiring in March and Peters’ teammate for 10 seasons, said in December. “He’s a very, very gifted individual. He’s smart and he loves the game.
“I coached Anthony Munoz, who was the best player ever at his position,” Jim McNally, an NFL offensive line coach for 27 years who had that position on the Bills’ staff from 2004-07, told Bleacher Report. “Jason Peters is the next best player I’ve ever coached.
Jones, a first-round draft pick in 2005 by the Jacksonville Jaguars, played wide receiver as a pro for four seasons.
“I can’t believe how many NFL teams missed out on Jason when they could have drafted him,” Jones said. “He’s just so naturally gifted. I knew he was going to be a stud in the pros.
“It’s amazing he’s played for 20 years. Yes, he has God-given ability, there’s no question about that. But the longevity is so impressive, because football’s a young man’s game.
“It just shows you how hard he’s worked all these years and taken care of his body. I don’t think there’s any question he’ll be a first ballot Pro Football Hall of Famer.”
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Excerpts from a 12/18/23 article by Zak Keefer of The Athletic as it appeared in the NYT.
The oldest player in football recently played in his 247th game, and Jason Peters' love of competition shows no signs of waning.
What would possess an offensive lineman to play 20 seasons in the NFL? Some of it’s complicated. Plenty of it’s not.
1. Peters was done with the sport before he ever started.
He was 14, a freshman in high school. It was the summer of 1996. Ten minutes into the first practice of his life, Peters slipped in a box-jumping drill, cracked his head against the wood and felt a lump starting to swell. The pain intensified. He thought he might pass out. He told the coach he needed to see a trainer, a nurse, someone.
“If you walk off this field,” the coach warned him, “you’re done.”
Peters walked off anyway, looking for help, resolute that he’d never play for that coach again. Who needed football, anyway? And for two years, the biggest, most gifted athlete at Queen City High in east Texas stuck to his word. He didn’t play as a freshman. Didn’t play as a sophomore.
By the time he was a junior, that same coach was begging him to reconsider.
“We need you,” the coach kept telling him. “We need you.”
Finally, Peters gave in. He became the best player on the team, this towering defensive end no one could block and who doubled as this towering tight end no one wanted to tackle. Word spread. College programs started to show interest. “I might have a chance to keep playing after high school,” Peters told himself.
2. He arrived at Arkansas in the fall of 2000 as a highly touted defensive end but couldn’t get on the field. After redshirting, then riding the bench for a full season, he decided to transfer. He sat down the Razorbacks’ coach, Houston Nutt, and told him his decision.
If he moved on, Nutt reminded him, he’d have to sit out a year.
“That’s fine,” Peters said, calling the coach’s bluff. “I’ll just work my tail off at the next place and get on the field that way.”
But Nutt wouldn’t let him leave. He pleaded.
“Just give me one more year,” the coach said.
Fine, Peters said. He’d give Arkansas one last shot.
“What coach didn’t tell me,” Peters says now, laughing just a bit, “is that he was moving me to tight end.”
Initially, he was skeptical. How many tight ends weigh 300 pounds?
But Peters wasn’t just any 300-pounder — he had the footwork of a point guard, a byproduct of his basketball days back in Queen City. He snared four touchdowns in an early-season practice and told himself, “OK, this might actually work.” His junior year, he finished third on the team in catches and hauled in five touchdowns, enough to earn an invite to the NFL Scouting Combine the following spring. Even now, all these years later, his tape is something to behold.
3. He still remembers what an assistant coach told him his rookie year in Buffalo, and how much it pissed him off.
“You’ll never play as long as I played!” the coach screamed.
Peters stored those words away, never letting them leave his mind. The coach had played forever — something like 17 or 18 years in the league, Peters remembers — and he knew the odds were against anyone in that room lasting half that long. “The average NFL career is three seasons,” Peters says. “That’s it. Three seasons and you’re done.”
“Tom Brady played 20 years,” Peters would tell close friends, “so why can’t I?”
4. Peters’ longtime agent, Vincent Taylor, remembers what teams told him before the 2004 draft. They loved Peters’ build but worried about his bulk. He was north of 300 pounds. Tight ends aren’t supposed to weight 300 pounds.
Some scouts saw Peters as a blocking tight end, essentially a sixth lineman. Others envisioned him moving to offensive tackle, a position he’d never played. The hope was he’d go as high as the fourth round, but on draft day, he and Taylor sat there, waiting. Hours passed. The fourth round came and went. Nothing. The fifth. Nothing. The sixth. Nothing. Finally, late in the seventh, the Chiefs called Taylor, telling him they were ready to take Peters with the 231st selection.
They had just one question: was he willing to switch positions? Taylor handed Peters the phone, urging him to sound enthused.
Peters nodded, but enthused wasn’t his style. Not then. Not now. “Can you play offensive line for us?” the Chiefs exec asked. “OK,” Peters replied.
Maybe it was the tone. Maybe it was the bluntness. Either way, the Chiefs weren’t sold. They pivoted. Pick 231 came, and they took an offensive tackle out of Syracuse named Kevin Sampson instead.
Peters never heard his name called. Sampson started seven career games. On Dec. 10, Peters played in his 247th.
5. He’s in Year 20, the oldest player in football, on his fourth team in four seasons, trying to block edge rushers two decades his junior. After a gilded 11-year run in Philadelphia, where Peters grew into the game’s best left tackle and a bedrock of one of the league’s most bruising offensive lines, he was content with all he’d accomplished: nine Pro Bowls, six All-Pro selections, a Super Bowl ring, $113 million in career earnings.
But he wasn’t ready to close the door. Not yet. He’d never grown tired of the work, the weekly grind, the rush of Sundays. Sixteen years in the league and his love for the game hadn’t faded.
Plus, what that coach had told him his rookie year in Buffalo still hung in his mind, gnawing at him enough to keep the door open.
You’ll never play as long as I played.
6. He left Philly after the 2020 season, uncertain what his future would look like. He settled back in Queen City and kept training. He decided he wouldn’t wait by the phone, hoping a team would call. But he’d answer if one did.
“After Philly, I was cool with everything I’d done,” Peters says. “But I can’t lie, the competitor in me was still there.”
Then his phone buzzed. “You wanna come up to Chicago and help us out?” Juan Castillo asked.
Castillo had been Peters’ first offensive line coach in Philly. He couldn’t tell him no. He signed with the Bears and made 15 starts in 2021, allowing six sacks across 485 pass-blocking snaps, per Pro Football Focus. He wasn’t all-world Jason Peters, but he’d shown he could still survive at one of the game’s most unforgiving positions. A year later the Cowboys called, and he had no issue suiting up for the Eagles’ chief rival — “that’s my hometown team,” the native Texan says.
This fall, it was Carroll and the tackle-needy Seahawks who reached out. They signed Peters to the practice squad in September, then after he worked through a quad injury, threw him into a two-man rotation with Stone Forsythe at right tackle. “You know how hard it is playing on the right side after you’ve been on the left for almost 20 years?” Peters admitted to Forsythe at one point.
In his first game, Peters found himself on an island against one of the most disruptive pass-rushers in the league, Cleveland’s Myles Garrett. He held his own. “A guy who is an incredible football player looked like a regular guy in those moments,” Carroll said of Garrett after the Seahawks’ 24-20 win, heaping praise on his 41-year-old tackle.
Two weeks later, Peters played so well the Seahawks ditched the rotation and left him in for 56 snaps against the WFT. Already stout in pass protection, Peters was central to Seattle’s second-half eruption in the run game, clearing lanes for Walker and Charbonnet in a 29-26 win.
How many 41-year-olds can do that?
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s one of them,” Carroll said. “What does it take? Whatever he’s got … he’s got great feet and quickness. You would think as you get older, you would lose that, but he has the ability to move and change direction and redirect, stuff that guys who are young don’t have.”
“The ageless wonder,” Seahawks QB Geno Smith called him.
7. The biggest change from the start of his career to now, Peters says, is the body type he sees across the line of scrimmage. In the early days, he’d face defensive ends — Jason Taylor, Michael Strahan and Simeon Rice, to name a few — who won almost exclusively with power. Now, Peters says, the edge rushers he sees are smaller, quicker, more agile. “These young guys are slippery,” he explains. “Nick Bosa don’t rush the same way Jason Taylor used to.”
8. The men who taught Peters how to be a pro early in his career are now in their late 40s and early 50s, decades removed from their playing days. Troy Vincent is 53 and has been working at the league office since 2010. Lawyer Milloy is 50 and has kids in college. London Fletcher is 48 and has been retired for a decade.
Peters is a month from 42 and still playing.
After waiting for hours on draft day, then never hearing his name called, Peters had options as a free agent. He ultimately picked the Bills because he believed their tight end room was thin, and it’d help his chances of getting on the field. The signing bonus was $5,000.
He was cut after his first training camp, then signed to the practice squad. He didn’t get elevated to the roster until November, and by season’s end was targeted in the passing game just once — an incompletion. He was a special teams grunt, an afterthought, and deep down, was growing frustrated.
As a practice squad tight end, Peters often worked against the Bills’ No. 1 defense.
One day he spent the entire practice blocking the team’s top pass rusher, Aaron Schobel, who’d just signed a six-year, $28 million contract, one of the richest in the league at the time.
Snap after snap, Peters owned him. Dominated him. At times, embarrassed him.
This went on for an hour. At one point, Schobel had enough.
“You’re going too hard for practice, man,” he told the rookie. “You’re making me look bad.”
Peters shrugged him off. “If you want me to stop, the coaches are gonna have to tell me to stop,” he shot back.
After the season, Peters sat down with head coach Mike Mularkey for his exit interview. “You know,” Mularkey told him, “the offensive line coach keeps asking about you.”
“I don’t care where I play,” Peters said. “As long as I’m playing.” So, for Year 2, he’d try something different.
By midseason he was the starter at right tackle. A year later he moved to the left side. Nine Pro Bowls would follow. So would a spot on the NFL’s all-decade team.
“The most impressive physical athlete I’ve ever played with,” says Jason Kelce, the Eagles’ longtime center.
9. Peters has lined up in front of 24 starting quarterbacks in his career, from Drew Bledsoe back in 2004 to, most recently, Drew Lock in Week 14.
Ask him favorite teammate, and he thinks about it for a moment, scanning the years. He’s had thousands.
“Lane Johnson,” he finally says, referring to the Eagles’ right tackle. “He’s like my brother.”
“As soon as I got in here,” Johnson says, “there was really never any animosity or ‘I was here to take his job.'”
“I just always envied how he worked,” he says of Peters. “You don’t play 20 years in the league if you don’t have a good work ethic, a good routine. So, I respect him that way.
And then I always respected how he treated people. Honestly, everybody knew what player he was. But I felt like with some of the stuff he did off the field — with helping people in the facility or helping people out — he had a big heart and he always thought about the guys here.”
10. The doctor had never seen anything like it. He’d seen Achilles tears, sure. He’d just never seen the same one torn twice in a span of three weeks.
In 2012, three years into his run in Philadelphia, Peters ruptured his right Achilles tendon training during the offseason.
Less than a month later, while rolling around in his house on a scooter, his injured ankle propped up behind him, the scooter’s handlebars snapped. Peters toppled over, snapping his Achilles again. He had to go under the knife again. “It was like putting together wet paper towels,” the surgeon told him later.
Peters was first-team All-Pro a year later. “Just a resilient son of a b—-,” Johnson calls him.
11. The knee, Peters says, was actually worse.
Midway through the 2017 season, the Eagles were rolling, about to move to 6-1.
Peters was still one of the best left tackles in the game, a nine-time Pro Bowl lineman headed for his 10th.
“I was dominating everyone,” he says nonchalantly.
Then, on the first snap of the third quarter of a Week 7 win over Washington, a 305-pound nose tackle named Evander Hood crashed into his right knee, shredding his ACL and MCL.
“Got my guy stoned at the line, and this guy just flew into my leg,” Peters says. “Tore my whole knee up.”
At first, his teammates didn’t soak in the severity of what had just happened, but the longer Peters laid there, the more it hit them. The Bodyguard — the nickname he’d earned and grown to like — wasn’t getting up. The entire roster jogged on the field while the trainers put Peters’ leg in an aircast and watched silently. Redskins’ linemen clapped out of respect. The fans at Lincoln Financial Field chanted his name while a trainer drove him off the field on a cart.
“Ja-son Pee-ters. Ja-son Pee-ters.”
The Eagles’ march toward a Super Bowl continued. Peters’ replacement, Halapaoulivaati Vaitai, was 24, just seven starts into his career. The injured vet took him under his wing and coached him behind the scenes. Three months later the franchise had its first Super Bowl triumph.
12. He remains a throwback, as you’d imagine, the aging vet groomed in another era who bristles at some of the changes he’s seen across his 20 years in the league.
“When I started, we didn’t have no Saturday games,” Peters says. “Now we’ve got Thursday games, even a Friday game. They’ve added all these new rules and regulations. I’m not a fan of some of those.”
Peters preferred how training camp worked back in the 2000s, when teams were still allowed to hold two-a-days and starting spots were earned under the stifling summer sun, not with weighty contracts handed out in March.
He doesn’t spend his offseason training at a fancy, state-of-the-art facility, and never has. Peters retreats to Queen City and works in solitude there.
On game days, his routine never changes. He stretches. He rubs on his Icy Hot. He plays.
“There’s no real secret to 20 seasons, just a lot of work,” he says. “But for some reason, I always had this mindset that I was this free agent who was about to get cut. Even when I was one of the best in the league, that’s what I told myself every year. Might sound crazy, but that’s the truth.”
He’s never married. He has no kids. Football’s been his life, the passion he fell into by accident, urged to give the sport another shot by the coach he vowed to never play for after he lasted all of 10 minutes in his first practice.
A quarter-century later, he still can’t quit it. “I just love it, man,” Peters says. “Just got this love for the game. Sometimes it’s that simple.”
Last summer, while he weighed shutting it down for good, he looked back on his career and marveled at how long he’s lasted. He was the undrafted, oversized tight end who was cut after his first training camp, switched positions twice and became one of the best offensive tackles of his generation.
“I was at 19 seasons,” Peters says. “And if I gotta be honest, 20 sounds a whole lot better.”
If Tom Brady can do it, why not him?
He’s not sure when it’ll end, but ask Peters about retirement, and he knows what it looks like.
“S—, man,” he says. “When they kick me out, I’m gonna go fishing.”
Brooks Kubena contributed to this story.
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At 42 years old and with 20 years of experience in the league he's not going to put himself through the rigors of an NFL training camp at this point in his career.
However, he hasn't retired. Like last year, he's waiting for the season to start before signing with someone in need of help.
That most likely won't happen until after week 1 so that his salary won't be guaranteed for the full season.
He signed a minimum one year after week one last year with the Seahawks that paid him $1.165 Million.
He initially signed to the Seahawks PS. He was elevated late October.
He had played LT his entire NFL career after entering the league as an undrafted Tight End. However, in 2023 he appeared in 8 games at RT, starting 2 of them.
He hasn't had a holding penalty in the past 3 seasons and has only had 16 over his entire 20-year career while appearing in 221 games with 228 starts.
He might not be as good as he once was, but he's probably as good once as he ever was. Even at his age he may be a better option as a starter at RT than what the Saints have now and without a doubt, he would be better than any backup OT currently on the roster.
I say bring him in now. Sign him to the vet minimum with a few incentives based on playing time, game snaps, and starts. So what if you have to guarantee his salary in full if he's on the roster week one. By then you'll know if he's needed or not. We're talking vet minimum. He can ride the bike on the side while getting up to speed on the playbook. Give him limited reps in practice. Let him have plenty of Vet days between now and opening day. That's just 3 weeks away.
He's probably the best "swing tackle" option available at this point that could provide value and insurance without the Saints having to make a trade to acquire one.
Excerpts from an April 16, 2024 article by Bob Holt of Hog Sports as it appeared at wholehogsports.com
When Matt Jones and Jason Peters were University of Arkansas football teammates more than 20 years ago, they used to play pickup basketball games in the HPER Building during the offseason to help stay in shape.
“One game we had a fastbreak and Jason pointed up to the basket,” said Jones, who played quarterback. “I didn’t throw him the [alley] oop pass. He said, ‘C’mon Matt, what’s going on?
“I said, ‘Man, you can’t get up like that.” The 6-4 Peters weighed more than 300 pounds and had come to Arkansas as a defensive tackle.
“Jason was like, ‘You just throw the ball up there, I’ll get it,” Jones said. “So, it wasn’t two more times back down the court, and I threw him a lob, and it was to the top of the square on the backboard.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh, man. I threw it too far.’ But Jason just jumped up like [long-time NBA center] Hakeem Olajuwon and dunked. The whole place was shaking.
“Jason’s a freak athlete.”
Peters has used his freakish athleticism and work ethic to play 20 seasons in the NFL — all at offensive tackle since playing tight end as a rookie in 2004. His vertical jump was measured at 34 inches at the scouting combine.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if that guy plays for another decade, to be honest with you,” Jason Kelce, the Philadelphia Eagles’ center for 13 years before retiring in March and Peters’ teammate for 10 seasons, said in December. “He’s a very, very gifted individual. He’s smart and he loves the game.
“I coached Anthony Munoz, who was the best player ever at his position,” Jim McNally, an NFL offensive line coach for 27 years who had that position on the Bills’ staff from 2004-07, told Bleacher Report. “Jason Peters is the next best player I’ve ever coached.
Jones, a first-round draft pick in 2005 by the Jacksonville Jaguars, played wide receiver as a pro for four seasons.
“I can’t believe how many NFL teams missed out on Jason when they could have drafted him,” Jones said. “He’s just so naturally gifted. I knew he was going to be a stud in the pros.
“It’s amazing he’s played for 20 years. Yes, he has God-given ability, there’s no question about that. But the longevity is so impressive, because football’s a young man’s game.
“It just shows you how hard he’s worked all these years and taken care of his body. I don’t think there’s any question he’ll be a first ballot Pro Football Hall of Famer.”
Jason Peters Arkansas Highlights As A Tight End
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Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame likely won't be final call for Jason Peters | Whole Hog Sports
At 42, Jason Peters is the oldest active NFL player and oldest to ever play offensive tackle in the league, according to The Athletic.
www.wholehogsports.comExcerpts from a 12/18/23 article by Zak Keefer of The Athletic as it appeared in the NYT.
20 years after his career began, this NFL lineman keeps defying the odds
The oldest player in football recently played in his 247th game, and Jason Peters' love of competition shows no signs of waning.
What would possess an offensive lineman to play 20 seasons in the NFL? Some of it’s complicated. Plenty of it’s not.
1. Peters was done with the sport before he ever started.
He was 14, a freshman in high school. It was the summer of 1996. Ten minutes into the first practice of his life, Peters slipped in a box-jumping drill, cracked his head against the wood and felt a lump starting to swell. The pain intensified. He thought he might pass out. He told the coach he needed to see a trainer, a nurse, someone.
“If you walk off this field,” the coach warned him, “you’re done.”
Peters walked off anyway, looking for help, resolute that he’d never play for that coach again. Who needed football, anyway? And for two years, the biggest, most gifted athlete at Queen City High in east Texas stuck to his word. He didn’t play as a freshman. Didn’t play as a sophomore.
By the time he was a junior, that same coach was begging him to reconsider.
“We need you,” the coach kept telling him. “We need you.”
Finally, Peters gave in. He became the best player on the team, this towering defensive end no one could block and who doubled as this towering tight end no one wanted to tackle. Word spread. College programs started to show interest. “I might have a chance to keep playing after high school,” Peters told himself.
2. He arrived at Arkansas in the fall of 2000 as a highly touted defensive end but couldn’t get on the field. After redshirting, then riding the bench for a full season, he decided to transfer. He sat down the Razorbacks’ coach, Houston Nutt, and told him his decision.
If he moved on, Nutt reminded him, he’d have to sit out a year.
“That’s fine,” Peters said, calling the coach’s bluff. “I’ll just work my tail off at the next place and get on the field that way.”
But Nutt wouldn’t let him leave. He pleaded.
“Just give me one more year,” the coach said.
Fine, Peters said. He’d give Arkansas one last shot.
“What coach didn’t tell me,” Peters says now, laughing just a bit, “is that he was moving me to tight end.”
Initially, he was skeptical. How many tight ends weigh 300 pounds?
But Peters wasn’t just any 300-pounder — he had the footwork of a point guard, a byproduct of his basketball days back in Queen City. He snared four touchdowns in an early-season practice and told himself, “OK, this might actually work.” His junior year, he finished third on the team in catches and hauled in five touchdowns, enough to earn an invite to the NFL Scouting Combine the following spring. Even now, all these years later, his tape is something to behold.
3. He still remembers what an assistant coach told him his rookie year in Buffalo, and how much it pissed him off.
“You’ll never play as long as I played!” the coach screamed.
Peters stored those words away, never letting them leave his mind. The coach had played forever — something like 17 or 18 years in the league, Peters remembers — and he knew the odds were against anyone in that room lasting half that long. “The average NFL career is three seasons,” Peters says. “That’s it. Three seasons and you’re done.”
“Tom Brady played 20 years,” Peters would tell close friends, “so why can’t I?”
4. Peters’ longtime agent, Vincent Taylor, remembers what teams told him before the 2004 draft. They loved Peters’ build but worried about his bulk. He was north of 300 pounds. Tight ends aren’t supposed to weight 300 pounds.
Some scouts saw Peters as a blocking tight end, essentially a sixth lineman. Others envisioned him moving to offensive tackle, a position he’d never played. The hope was he’d go as high as the fourth round, but on draft day, he and Taylor sat there, waiting. Hours passed. The fourth round came and went. Nothing. The fifth. Nothing. The sixth. Nothing. Finally, late in the seventh, the Chiefs called Taylor, telling him they were ready to take Peters with the 231st selection.
They had just one question: was he willing to switch positions? Taylor handed Peters the phone, urging him to sound enthused.
Peters nodded, but enthused wasn’t his style. Not then. Not now. “Can you play offensive line for us?” the Chiefs exec asked. “OK,” Peters replied.
Maybe it was the tone. Maybe it was the bluntness. Either way, the Chiefs weren’t sold. They pivoted. Pick 231 came, and they took an offensive tackle out of Syracuse named Kevin Sampson instead.
Peters never heard his name called. Sampson started seven career games. On Dec. 10, Peters played in his 247th.
5. He’s in Year 20, the oldest player in football, on his fourth team in four seasons, trying to block edge rushers two decades his junior. After a gilded 11-year run in Philadelphia, where Peters grew into the game’s best left tackle and a bedrock of one of the league’s most bruising offensive lines, he was content with all he’d accomplished: nine Pro Bowls, six All-Pro selections, a Super Bowl ring, $113 million in career earnings.
But he wasn’t ready to close the door. Not yet. He’d never grown tired of the work, the weekly grind, the rush of Sundays. Sixteen years in the league and his love for the game hadn’t faded.
Plus, what that coach had told him his rookie year in Buffalo still hung in his mind, gnawing at him enough to keep the door open.
You’ll never play as long as I played.
6. He left Philly after the 2020 season, uncertain what his future would look like. He settled back in Queen City and kept training. He decided he wouldn’t wait by the phone, hoping a team would call. But he’d answer if one did.
“After Philly, I was cool with everything I’d done,” Peters says. “But I can’t lie, the competitor in me was still there.”
Then his phone buzzed. “You wanna come up to Chicago and help us out?” Juan Castillo asked.
Castillo had been Peters’ first offensive line coach in Philly. He couldn’t tell him no. He signed with the Bears and made 15 starts in 2021, allowing six sacks across 485 pass-blocking snaps, per Pro Football Focus. He wasn’t all-world Jason Peters, but he’d shown he could still survive at one of the game’s most unforgiving positions. A year later the Cowboys called, and he had no issue suiting up for the Eagles’ chief rival — “that’s my hometown team,” the native Texan says.
This fall, it was Carroll and the tackle-needy Seahawks who reached out. They signed Peters to the practice squad in September, then after he worked through a quad injury, threw him into a two-man rotation with Stone Forsythe at right tackle. “You know how hard it is playing on the right side after you’ve been on the left for almost 20 years?” Peters admitted to Forsythe at one point.
In his first game, Peters found himself on an island against one of the most disruptive pass-rushers in the league, Cleveland’s Myles Garrett. He held his own. “A guy who is an incredible football player looked like a regular guy in those moments,” Carroll said of Garrett after the Seahawks’ 24-20 win, heaping praise on his 41-year-old tackle.
Two weeks later, Peters played so well the Seahawks ditched the rotation and left him in for 56 snaps against the WFT. Already stout in pass protection, Peters was central to Seattle’s second-half eruption in the run game, clearing lanes for Walker and Charbonnet in a 29-26 win.
How many 41-year-olds can do that?
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s one of them,” Carroll said. “What does it take? Whatever he’s got … he’s got great feet and quickness. You would think as you get older, you would lose that, but he has the ability to move and change direction and redirect, stuff that guys who are young don’t have.”
“The ageless wonder,” Seahawks QB Geno Smith called him.
7. The biggest change from the start of his career to now, Peters says, is the body type he sees across the line of scrimmage. In the early days, he’d face defensive ends — Jason Taylor, Michael Strahan and Simeon Rice, to name a few — who won almost exclusively with power. Now, Peters says, the edge rushers he sees are smaller, quicker, more agile. “These young guys are slippery,” he explains. “Nick Bosa don’t rush the same way Jason Taylor used to.”
8. The men who taught Peters how to be a pro early in his career are now in their late 40s and early 50s, decades removed from their playing days. Troy Vincent is 53 and has been working at the league office since 2010. Lawyer Milloy is 50 and has kids in college. London Fletcher is 48 and has been retired for a decade.
Peters is a month from 42 and still playing.
After waiting for hours on draft day, then never hearing his name called, Peters had options as a free agent. He ultimately picked the Bills because he believed their tight end room was thin, and it’d help his chances of getting on the field. The signing bonus was $5,000.
He was cut after his first training camp, then signed to the practice squad. He didn’t get elevated to the roster until November, and by season’s end was targeted in the passing game just once — an incompletion. He was a special teams grunt, an afterthought, and deep down, was growing frustrated.
As a practice squad tight end, Peters often worked against the Bills’ No. 1 defense.
One day he spent the entire practice blocking the team’s top pass rusher, Aaron Schobel, who’d just signed a six-year, $28 million contract, one of the richest in the league at the time.
Snap after snap, Peters owned him. Dominated him. At times, embarrassed him.
This went on for an hour. At one point, Schobel had enough.
“You’re going too hard for practice, man,” he told the rookie. “You’re making me look bad.”
Peters shrugged him off. “If you want me to stop, the coaches are gonna have to tell me to stop,” he shot back.
After the season, Peters sat down with head coach Mike Mularkey for his exit interview. “You know,” Mularkey told him, “the offensive line coach keeps asking about you.”
“I don’t care where I play,” Peters said. “As long as I’m playing.” So, for Year 2, he’d try something different.
By midseason he was the starter at right tackle. A year later he moved to the left side. Nine Pro Bowls would follow. So would a spot on the NFL’s all-decade team.
“The most impressive physical athlete I’ve ever played with,” says Jason Kelce, the Eagles’ longtime center.
9. Peters has lined up in front of 24 starting quarterbacks in his career, from Drew Bledsoe back in 2004 to, most recently, Drew Lock in Week 14.
Ask him favorite teammate, and he thinks about it for a moment, scanning the years. He’s had thousands.
“Lane Johnson,” he finally says, referring to the Eagles’ right tackle. “He’s like my brother.”
“As soon as I got in here,” Johnson says, “there was really never any animosity or ‘I was here to take his job.'”
“I just always envied how he worked,” he says of Peters. “You don’t play 20 years in the league if you don’t have a good work ethic, a good routine. So, I respect him that way.
And then I always respected how he treated people. Honestly, everybody knew what player he was. But I felt like with some of the stuff he did off the field — with helping people in the facility or helping people out — he had a big heart and he always thought about the guys here.”
10. The doctor had never seen anything like it. He’d seen Achilles tears, sure. He’d just never seen the same one torn twice in a span of three weeks.
In 2012, three years into his run in Philadelphia, Peters ruptured his right Achilles tendon training during the offseason.
Less than a month later, while rolling around in his house on a scooter, his injured ankle propped up behind him, the scooter’s handlebars snapped. Peters toppled over, snapping his Achilles again. He had to go under the knife again. “It was like putting together wet paper towels,” the surgeon told him later.
Peters was first-team All-Pro a year later. “Just a resilient son of a b—-,” Johnson calls him.
11. The knee, Peters says, was actually worse.
Midway through the 2017 season, the Eagles were rolling, about to move to 6-1.
Peters was still one of the best left tackles in the game, a nine-time Pro Bowl lineman headed for his 10th.
“I was dominating everyone,” he says nonchalantly.
Then, on the first snap of the third quarter of a Week 7 win over Washington, a 305-pound nose tackle named Evander Hood crashed into his right knee, shredding his ACL and MCL.
“Got my guy stoned at the line, and this guy just flew into my leg,” Peters says. “Tore my whole knee up.”
At first, his teammates didn’t soak in the severity of what had just happened, but the longer Peters laid there, the more it hit them. The Bodyguard — the nickname he’d earned and grown to like — wasn’t getting up. The entire roster jogged on the field while the trainers put Peters’ leg in an aircast and watched silently. Redskins’ linemen clapped out of respect. The fans at Lincoln Financial Field chanted his name while a trainer drove him off the field on a cart.
“Ja-son Pee-ters. Ja-son Pee-ters.”
The Eagles’ march toward a Super Bowl continued. Peters’ replacement, Halapaoulivaati Vaitai, was 24, just seven starts into his career. The injured vet took him under his wing and coached him behind the scenes. Three months later the franchise had its first Super Bowl triumph.
12. He remains a throwback, as you’d imagine, the aging vet groomed in another era who bristles at some of the changes he’s seen across his 20 years in the league.
“When I started, we didn’t have no Saturday games,” Peters says. “Now we’ve got Thursday games, even a Friday game. They’ve added all these new rules and regulations. I’m not a fan of some of those.”
Peters preferred how training camp worked back in the 2000s, when teams were still allowed to hold two-a-days and starting spots were earned under the stifling summer sun, not with weighty contracts handed out in March.
He doesn’t spend his offseason training at a fancy, state-of-the-art facility, and never has. Peters retreats to Queen City and works in solitude there.
On game days, his routine never changes. He stretches. He rubs on his Icy Hot. He plays.
“There’s no real secret to 20 seasons, just a lot of work,” he says. “But for some reason, I always had this mindset that I was this free agent who was about to get cut. Even when I was one of the best in the league, that’s what I told myself every year. Might sound crazy, but that’s the truth.”
He’s never married. He has no kids. Football’s been his life, the passion he fell into by accident, urged to give the sport another shot by the coach he vowed to never play for after he lasted all of 10 minutes in his first practice.
A quarter-century later, he still can’t quit it. “I just love it, man,” Peters says. “Just got this love for the game. Sometimes it’s that simple.”
Last summer, while he weighed shutting it down for good, he looked back on his career and marveled at how long he’s lasted. He was the undrafted, oversized tight end who was cut after his first training camp, switched positions twice and became one of the best offensive tackles of his generation.
“I was at 19 seasons,” Peters says. “And if I gotta be honest, 20 sounds a whole lot better.”
If Tom Brady can do it, why not him?
He’s not sure when it’ll end, but ask Peters about retirement, and he knows what it looks like.
“S—, man,” he says. “When they kick me out, I’m gonna go fishing.”
Brooks Kubena contributed to this story.
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Truly believe 2 things, depending on how this 49ers game look, I can see us looking at a tackle possibly next week. Would be nice to add someone and evaluate the player, before our last preseason game.
Also like someone stated on here, possibly a vet after week 1 to sign with us so it's not guaranteed or whatever.
Or hopefully someone slips thru after cuts. Definitely see an addition to adding a tackle after this game tho with injuries to A few on the line.
Also like someone stated on here, possibly a vet after week 1 to sign with us so it's not guaranteed or whatever.
Or hopefully someone slips thru after cuts. Definitely see an addition to adding a tackle after this game tho with injuries to A few on the line.
dennisrwood
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Great article on Jason Peters. He has to be better than Penning at this point.
Optimistic Ozzy
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We'll sign 2 tackles in the next 2 weeks.
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Yeah I think this is what made people freak out a bit yesterday with Fuaga’s injury. It doesn’t seem severe, but it certainly highlights how close we are to an absolute disaster OL scenario.
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I hope we get more depth but I acknowledge that youre always 1 injury away from somebody.
At least are backups are not Daryl Terrell and Victor Riley.
Optimistic Ozzy
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I see your Victor Riley, and raise you a Keno Hills.
rlemieux
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Both are probably still better than Penning. They definitely were in thier prime. At this point we’d be better calling Willie Roaf or Kyle Turley.
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There was a recent sighting of Jermon Bushrod with a headset and a microphone. He looked solid on his feet.
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