Be thankful for what you have, you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever, have enough.
—Oprah Winfrey
Under Chip Kelly, the Eagles became a national story. Chip was a tsunami of energy, and he had taken Andy’s four-and-twelve team and led us to a ten-and-six record in 2013. Of course, turnarounds like that happen in the NFL, where parity has become the norm. Over the course of a season, only a handful of key plays may, in the end, separate the league’s elite teams from its also-rans.
The reason people were talking about us wasn’t our improved record so much as how Chip was coaching. He was an offensive innovator, bringing with him from Oregon a dynamic RPO—run, pass, option—offense that was all about tempo. He would run more plays faster than anyone else—ever. At first, Chip’s system took the NFL by surprise. (Until opposing defenses caught up, as happens.)
Chip—who I loved playing for, and who I still speak with today—was great at talking to, and inspiring, the team as a group. He became known for his focus on mental conditioning and sports science.
Chip was dead-on when he observed that NFL teams spend way too long timing how fast guys run rather than evaluating their mental toughness. I knew this firsthand. I can’t tell you how many coaches over the years would shake their heads and tell me that my knee-to-ankle ratio was off, or act like they needed to time my sprints with a friggin’ calendar.
None of that technical stuff measured the heart of a man, which often made the difference come Sunday. And my whole game was all about heart: You can hit me as hard as you want and I will stand up every damn time. Because what you can do to me ain’t shit compared to what I’ve been through. So let’s go.
So I loved it when Chip would bring in motivational speakers to help get us into top mental shape. Like the time one speaker placed a couple of two-by-four wooden beams on the locker room floor and had us all walk on them, from one end to the other. Guys were moonwalking, side-shuffling, laughing up a storm.
“Pretty easy, right?” our speaker asked. Yeah, of course.
But then our attention was called to a photo of ironworkers hard at work, walking across metal beams some two hundred feet in the air. “How easy would that be?”
Uh, that’s kinda different. “Why? Guys, it’s the same thing,” our speaker said. “You guys just did it, backpedaling, laughing. If you’re going to clam up at two hundred feet, what’s the difference? You looked around. You let outside factors affect the task at hand.”
Wow. That really spoke to me, as someone who has learned that the story we tell ourselves ultimately determines our reality. I could tell it got the other guys thinking, too. Just how much were our thoughts holding us back?
Chip liked to say, “You can’t fake football,” and he was so right. It’s what Coach Hay was getting at back at Golden West, when he told us that our conduct on the football field would reveal our character. But beware of anyone who thinks he’s discovered the answer; sometimes Chip’s emphasis on mental conditioning and sports science could go too far.
Don’t get me wrong: I loved Chip, and still do. He motivated and inspired me. And his intentions were good. But here’s what I learned during that time: if you ran into someone in the facility and asked why they were there and the answer was “to support the thesis I’m writing,” well, they probably should find somewhere else to hang out. The only answer should be, “I’m here to help this team win football games.”
Chip was all about winning, and he wanted to give the players every opportunity to get an edge. But once he hired three guys as his sports-science gurus, they hooked us up to electrodes so much that players started to feel like lab rats. The days became more about a checklist of useless tests than winning football games.
In my case, they tried to tell me that some of their tests showed I must be depressed, and that I drank too much and didn’t sleep enough. Puh-leeze. I love life. I rarely drink. And I sleep like a freakin’ log. Then the sports-science guys and special-teams coach Dave Fipp sat me and punter Donnie Jones down and told us to write on a three-by-five card three thoughts we have before snapping and punting, respectively. Donnie and I looked at each other.
“I don’t think anything,” I said.
“Me too,” Donnie said. “I punt the damn ball.”
Asking what I think about before I snap the ball shows you lack understanding about what football is all about. It’s about not thinking, geniuses. It’s about training your muscle memory so you can shut off distracting thoughts and just focus on the task at hand. Ever since my rookie year in Buffalo, when, thanks to Elko, I started muttering “fire it in there, don’t be a pussy” to myself before snapping, my life had been a testament to what the Buddhists call the state of “no mind.” Now here were these sports-science guys and Coach Fipp insisting that I was thinking out on the field, and accusing me of not taking their questions seriously.
They put GPS trackers in our footballs and wanted to crunch the numbers with us. I told them to go have themselves a party with their charts but to leave me out of it. Not because I’m some kind of rebel, but because I know what works for me.
“I’m not curing cancer here,” I told the sports-science crew. “I’m taking a ball and snapping it between my legs like an idiot. Let’s just keep it that simple. When I start overcomplicating it and overthinking, I play bad.”
They were insistent, though, that I really was thinking—and I was in denial. Well, wouldn’t you know it? That refrain from them became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Against the Miami Dolphins, leaning over the ball, for the first time in years, I was aware of my own thoughts. I was self-conscious, when the goal is to transcend consciousness. I snapped the ball… and it went high and right of the punter… and the punt was blocked.
You succeed at sports the same way you succeed at life: By overcoming negative self-talk. How much was my brain shut off during games? If you asked me the score during a game and I told it to you, I was thinking way too much. There were times when I thought we were going into halftime when the game was actually over. Remember that Kevin Costner movie For the Love of the Game? He plays a pitcher throwing a perfect game who doesn’t even realize it, because he’s flashing back on his life throughout all nine innings. I recognized myself in that character—though Costner can’t really pull off my leading-man chops.
Seriously, it probably would have horrified the sports-science guys to know just how out of it I was during games. One time while on the sideline, I noticed Kevin James and Vince Vaughn on the field. They were promoting their new movie, The Dilemma. They were at the other end zone, walking around, high-fiving fans.
I’m a big Kevin James fan. Oh my God, I thought. If ever there’s a time I can meet Kevin James and he’ll think I’m cool, it’s now, when I’m in uniform. I started pulling for our offense to get a first down so I could still be on the sideline when he got near. As he was getting closer, I ran down the sideline to meet him, right near one of the coaches, who looked at me and said, “Where are you going?”
“Coach, it’s Kevin James,” I said. He just looked at me blankly—I don’t think he understood. Just then, the offense came up short on third down, so I had to get on field for the punt. By the time I got back, I could see James and Vaughn walking into the tunnel. And I slammed my helmet on the ground and cursed.
“What happened?” one of the coaches asked.
“Man, Kevin James walked into the tunnel—that’s what happened!” I snapped.
My teammates shied away from me a little after that. But there was a method to that madness. I don’t overthink snapping—and asking about thinking actually encourages overthinking. You put in all those hours training to let your body take over—so you can be free to go stalk Kevin James on the field.
I’m a wired, high-energy guy—the frantic magician onstage is no act—but to succeed on the field I learned I had to slow down my heart rate. Before games, my teammates Connor Barwin and Jason Kelce would punch each other in the face at their lockers while Donnie Jones and I would cower, hoping they wouldn’t turn their pregame rage on us. Well, that’s what they needed. I needed just the opposite; I’d listen to “Wind Beneath My Wings”—Mom’s song—and actually nap at my locker right up until it was time to take the field. Kicker David Akers would wake me and I’d run out there after a ten-minute power nap, ready to roll.
I knew from knowing myself that if my heart rate was too elevated, my snaps would be, too. They’d go high, or wobble, or just be slightly off. So I turned snapping into a magic move. People like to say “the hand is quicker than the eye,” but that’s not really true. A killer move in magic doesn’t come from speed, it comes from being calculated, from being trained, from slowing everything down around you. The most beautiful magic moves are the opposite of fast; they’re slow and smooth. Once I had boiled my job down to its simplest parts on the football field—naturally, without thinking—I was able to perform consistently.
But now I had found myself smack-dab in the middle of a culture clash, confronted by a philosophy that, whether intended or not, complicated what I did. In recent years, sports has been overrun by nonathletic dudes in lab coats and computer geeks. I get it—they can play an important role, and coaches are wise to latch on to anything that can give them an edge. But sometimes you can have too much data, and because you’ve made up your mind that you’ve discovered the secret to the football universe, you can assign meaning to data that is essentially meaningless.
That’s what the sports-science guys didn’t get. How bad was it? They sewed GPS tracking devices into our jerseys during practice. Once, when I was leaving the practice field, one of these dudes came up to me, breathless.
“Jon, congratulations!” he said. “You hit a personal record today.”
“Really? In what?” I hadn’t done much. Practiced a few snaps and generally tried to look interested.
“Look at your chart,” he said, shuffling through his papers. “You ran eighteen-point-nine miles per hour today.”
Huh? In all the data they’d collected on me during practice, I had never run faster than six miles per hour. Come to think of it, I hardly ever ran at all. How could I have run so fast? Bryan Braman was the fastest special-teams player, and he consistently logged in at twenty-one, maybe twenty-two miles per hour. I’m, like two miles per hour slower than one of the fastest guys on the team? I don’t think so.
I wracked my brain. Wait a minute, I thought. I didn’t even put my cleats on today. But I did drive the cart around in practice, and probably hit 18.9 miles per hour on the straightaway heading to the practice bubble. I started cracking up. “You guys’ heads are so far up your own ass your common sense is gone,” I told the sports-science genius. “You timed me driving a friggin’ cart!”
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not anti-science. Global warming is real and man-made. But I am anti–junk science, and the more these sports-science gurus talked in acronyms to us, the more it felt like this was a fad dressed up as fact. Turns out, there were some significant red flags behind much of the sports-science research that should have led coaches to keep it all in perspective. For example, most of the studies cited—like the one that prescribed a stretch for me that didn’t do jack shit—were based on a statistical method unique to sports science. It’s called Magnetic Based Inference, or MBI.
It’s a complicated formula, and I ain’t no scientist, but an investigation by Christie Aschwanden and Mai Nguyen at FiveThirtyEight.com laid bare the fundamental problem with it. If, say, you want to determine whether a stretch can improve athletic performance, the tried-and-true method is to recruit highly fit volunteers and conduct lab tests on them over a long period of time. That takes a while and usually results in small sample sizes. MBI gets around these problems by relying on a statistical approach embedded in Excel spreadsheets, making it more speculative—a prediction—than a report of actual facts.
The result? As Stanford University’s Kristin Sainani reported in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, MBI lowers the standard of evidence and increases false-positive rates. Now, I couldn’t actually debate the sports-science dudes on any of this. They’d, like, use big words. But remember, I’m a guy who fudged his way into a college scholarship, and you can’t BS a BSer. I sensed it was BS when they were talking to me, and now, lo and behold, come studies that show that much of it was just that.
Here’s the thing. Even if all the science behind it was dead-on, the fadlike rush to embrace sports science as if it was the answer ignored the truth about what really makes for success in football. This I know: it’s that Band of Brothers, bros-being-bros culture that my man Jon Runyan carried in his very being. I had to laugh when the science guys told us that having a few beers wiped away the benefits of two weeks of training. Well, let me tell you the football roster I want around me. I want a team of Jon Runyans. I want a guy who drinks whiskey straight and punches you square in the face, flicks his cigarette to the ground, and goes home. That’s who I want—rather than the guy hooked up to wires running on a perfectly smooth track attached to a parachute.
No, give me the guy who has holes in his boots, who drives a beat-up truck, who drinks a beer in one gulp, and who, when you look at his wife the wrong way, just knocks you out and then goes back to eating a rare steak. I’ll take that guy any day, because that’s the game we play. That guy? When the shit hits the fan, he’s going to be a little more calm, cool, and collected than the dude being timed at the $100-million training facility.
My problem wasn’t with Chip; it was with the guys he brought in to run tests on us. Man, we’re a roomful of alpha males. You’d better come at us with some credibility or you’re gonna suffer some consequences. Once, they put me in a chair and stood around talking shit to me, to test my response: “Jon, you’re a slow piece of shit, you don’t run fast, I’m going to destroy you…”
One of these guys asked me, “What are you feeling right now, Jon?”
Seriously? What was this, psych class? I looked at him and said: “Well, I’m slow, but I’m still here, playing this game. Dude, who are you? Why am I even wasting my time listening to you? Like, are you serious right now? Motherfucker, I lost my family when I was twelve. You think I give a shit about what you say to me?”
After that Miami game in which I thought about thinking instead of just doing, I was done with these jokers. I had a couple of shaky games and the Eagles auditioned a couple of long snappers. The media crowded around my locker, wondering how I felt about that. Why the hell was everyone so curious about my feelings all of a sudden?
“Let me tell you something,” I said. “If someone on the street is better than I am, that’s my fault for even opening the door. They’re not my competition. My competition”—and, here, I pointed to my head—“is right here.”
I remember telling the reporters, “Look, I’ve been through a lot worse than a couple of bad snaps,” and I flashed back on a slide Chip once showed the whole team. It was a photo of a tiger and the caption read: “Tigers don’t lose sleep over the opinions of sheep.” Hell, yes, that’s me: a tiger, albeit one without a lot of, uh, foot speed. But that slide spoke to me. The opinions of people who don’t matter are of no consequence to me. The worst thing a specialist in sports can do is get stuck in his own head. I politely told the sports-science guys they could kiss my ass. To go ahead with their numbers and charts and experiments, but I didn’t want to hear one word about them. A lot of my teammates felt the same way. Our checklist of tests was killing team morale.
Chip spent three seasons in Philly, and our record got worse each year. We finished seven-and-nine in 2015 and he was fired. Now, don’t get me wrong: I still believe Chip is an awesome coach. He was damn right that there’s no faking football. Some sports, you can run around and blend in. But when we put on that game film on Mondays? It’s you and the guy lined up across from you, and there’s no getting around that. Coaches like to say, “There’s no ‘I’ in team,” but Chip would point out: “There’s an ‘I’ in win.” He wanted our self-talk to be personally accountable, but for the good of the team: I will dominate this play, I will not let my teammates down.
That’s deep stuff, and it made me a better player. But for a lot of us, the emphasis on sports science under Chip not only wasn’t what football was all about, it got in our heads and distracted us from what worked. After I told the sports-science guys to party on without me, I went back to thinking about precisely nothing. And in 2015, I made the Pro Bowl again.