Editor's note: This article was originally published on Jan. 17, 2024. It has been republished after Jason Kelce officially announced his retirement from the NFL.
The Philadelphia Eagles completed their late-season collapse with a playoff loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and while there will be undoubted fallout from that, it also marked a sad end to the career of one of the game’s greats: center Jason Kelce.
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He chooses to walk away from the game at the end of his 13th season, per ESPN's Adam Schefter, having previously debated retirement only to give it another go in the past.
Kelce now leaves the team with a hole at center for the first time since the 2010 season, stepping away as unquestionably one of the greatest centers to play the game.
Unlike some other future Hall of Famers, Kelce was not a heralded prospect coming out of college. A sixth-round draft choice, Kelce was drafted by Andy Reid when he was still with the Eagles.
At the time, the NFL was looking for size on the offensive line, even at the center position. Matt Birk's (6-foot-5, 308 pounds) NFL career was coming to an end. Nick Mangold (6-foot-4, 307 pounds) was in his prime, and Alex Mack (6-foot-4, 311 pounds) had just entered the league a couple of years earlier. Kelce weighed 280 pounds at the NFL Combine in 2011, and while he was listed at 295 in the NFL, he certainly never looked it on tape when he was blocking anybody weighing more than 300 pounds.
Throughout his career, Kelce overcame his size with speed, quickness and technique. Out in space, Kelce ran like a skill position player and outmaneuvered defenders, including linebackers and defensive backs, to spring Eagles ball carriers with blocks. He was overmatched physically by interior guys who weighed 330 pounds, but his quickness allowed him to win the leverage battle and beat them to the point of attack. His athleticism and agility enabled him to prevent situations where he was simply run over by a bigger, more powerful human.
At his best, Kelce was the NFL's top center. He finishes his time in the league with a 94.2 overall grade and a 95.5 run-blocking grade. He led the league in PFF grade at his position in three consecutive seasons (2017-19) and was ranked in the top five on four more occasions.
Jason Kelce | Five-Year Snapshot
Even this season, at 36 years old, Kelce was playing at an elite level. His 80.7 PFF grade ranked fourth in the league, and he was one of only 10 centers to have a PFF grade above 70.0 in both run blocking and pass blocking.
His 94.1 PFF grade in 2017 stands as the best single-season grade any center has received since 2006, and he is one of fewer than 10 players to top 90.0 over a season.
The weaker area of Kelce’s game over his career was pass protection, where his scope for leverage and angles is reduced by the uniform nature of the pocket. Sometimes a guy who simply outweighed him by 50 pounds had a straight-line run at him, but he still surrendered just 19 sacks across 13 seasons, including the playoffs
Kelce also anchored one of the best offensive lines the league has seen in recent years. The Philadelphia Eagles have finished at the top of PFF’s end-of-season offensive line rankings in each of the past two seasons, leading from pillar to post in 2022. The fielded the NFL's best offensive line in four of the past seven seasons, all with Kelce leading the unit in the middle.
Kelce appeared on PFF’s Top 101 list five separate times, peaking as high as No. 17 following the 2022 NFL season.
By any measure, Kelce had an outstanding career. Defying the odds to succeed as an undersized, unheralded draft pick, he went on to anchor a unit that was consistently one of the best offensive lines in football. And on an individual basis, he put together some of the best seasons PFF has seen at the position.
Kelce walks away from the game still clearly capable of playing at an elite level, choosing to call it a career on his own terms rather than wait for the league to cast him aside. He leaves as one of the NFL's great success stories of the past 20 years and will surely have a spot waiting for him in Canton.
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