Super Bowl a fitting end to Long’s eventful year in Philly
PHILADELPHIA » Chris Long has been deluged for Super Bowl ticket requests by friends he hasn’t spoken to in years.
“Who just happen to be in Minneapolis for the game,” he said with a grin Thursday.
Long also is the goto guy of Eagles teammates hitting him up for the skinny on the New England Patriots, who he helped win a Super Bowl last year. His guys get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And it’s not a discourse on the Spygate and Deflategate reputations of Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady.
“I’m not going to get into all that,” Long said. “But what intimidates teams about the Patriots is that they’re good at football, and they’ve been good at football for a long time. The continuity that they have at the quarterback position, and other important positions, and coaching, they’ve been able to be at this level continually for almost two decades. And it’s remarkable. Some teams do get intimidated by that. At the end of the day, and they’d tell you this, too, it’s all about winning at football and executing two Sundays from now. It has nothing to do with history, one way or the other.”
The Patriots are in their 10th Super Bowl, unprecedented among NFL teams. Another title and they match the Pittsburgh Steelers for most championships, six and counting.
Considering where Long came from, plus his celebrity father Howie, who played college football at Villanova, how he donated his base salary this season to charity and what’s on the line the first Sunday of February, the only way this script could get more Hollywood is if the Eagles win their first Lombardi Trophy at the expense of Belichick and Brady.
Chris Long’s eccentric trek through free agency along would be an interesting chapter. It began with a chat with Belichick, and ended after a call to Howie Roseman.
“When you play for a guy that awesome of a coach, you look at football different,” Long said of Belichick. “I learned a lot from him. I called him before I hit free agency and I said, ‘hey, I don’t want to waste your time. I don’t know if I have a spot or not but I know, at 32 years old, if I’m going to play at a high level I can be proud of, I need to play (in another scheme). And I understand y’all scheme is y’all scheme.’ He understood that from the beginning.” Long is most productive as a rush end in a 4-3 alignment, which broke into the league with on the St. Louis Rams, then the 3-4 hybrid used by the Patriots. Belichick, at a news conference, confirmed that while adding he still felt Long would have been able to contribute to the Patriots this season.
“Chris has a lot of good skills but his overall skill set and experience is probably more in … it definitely is more in the system that he’s in than it was in our system, which is closer to the system that he played in with the Rams,” Belichick said. “He did a great job for us. Look, there was no better teammate or guy that tried to embrace the program than Chris. But in the end, he probably has a better fit there for his skills and for this point in his career than maybe we had for him. I understand that. He probably made a good decision. He probably did. Not that it wouldn’t have worked out here.
“It certainly has worked out well for him there, just like it worked out well for him here last year.”
Long, meanwhile, wasn’t exactly get a lot of interest on the free agent market after parting ways with the Patriots. Just the opposite. Truth be told, he began questioning why he didn’t stick around to possibly make another Super Bowl run. It was about to turn into a big regret.
“Where I was last year I had a bunch of people who were like, ‘you’re crazy leaving the Patriots and you suck,’” Long said. “You know what I mean? ‘You’re old, you’re washed up.’ Football fans, those folks. I was antsy to get on a team and I saw the team I wanted to get on. Once Connor (Barwin) left the Eagles, I called him and asked what it was like there. He’s like ‘it’s awesome, you’re going to love it, you’re going to be a great fit.’ And we traded notes on LA and Philly. And I was like, ‘I’ve got to get ahold of somebody and tell them I want to keep playing, and I’ve still got a lot in the tank.’”
Long contacted Eagles football operations chief Roseman, and the rest was history.
Long has 5 sacks this year, one more than last season, despite playing fewer snaps. He’s coming off his best playoff game, having hit Case Keenum to help create a gamechanging pick-six by Patrick Robinson, and recovering a Keenum fumble to set up another score.
The next challenge ahead is Brady.
“He’s the best all-time, he’s the Goat,” Long said. “It is what it is. Like any quarterback you’ve got to get pressure on him.”
That’s as far as Long wanted to go.
But it’s safe to say he cannot wait to see how this chapter of his life ends.