The Philadelphia Eagles have been playing football for 20 of the past 22 weeks. It’s grueling, but somehow they’re heading into the Super Bowl with only one starter missing from their Week 1 roster. That’s incredible.
Now the Eagles are getting ready to play the last game of the season after a well-earned bye week. Everything seems more or less peachy.
The most important injury reports in the most important week
The Last time we saw the Eagles, Landon Dickerson and Cam Jurgens were both so banged up that an injured Jurgens had to come in at center to replace Dickerson—who had initially replaced Jurgens. It wasn’t good.
That was one of the bigger stories this week because those two have a tall task ahead of them with stopping the Chiefs’ superstar defensive lineman Chris Jones. It’s looking like everything is cool now.
Jurgens and Dickerson were both full participants on Thursday, so while that’s great news, it doesn’t mean that they’ll be at 100%. To be fair, there probably aren’t many linemen who are at, or near, 100% in February.
It’s also cool that it’s looking like Kenny Gainwell will be clearing concussion protocol. He got taken out of the game after he took a bad hit on the opening kickoff of the second half in the NFC Championship game.
The scary addition to the injury report is Jalen Carter. He missed some of his media availability this week with an illness that was so bad that he was actually designated as a limited participant on Wednesday’s practice report.
It’s good that he went up to a full participant on Thursday, but it sure would’ve been cool if the most important player on defense didn’t get sick a handful of days before the biggest game of his career.
It’s also a problem because the illness is spreading and Quinyon Mitchell has Laryngitis… so, you know. That really sucks.
O.J. Spivey of the Philadelphia Tribune tweeted that he was supposed to meet with Nolan Smith last Saturday, but Smith was wearing a mask and said, “You don’t want what I have.”
Maybe that’s where it started, or maybe it was something from Monday’s media night. Who knows? Either way, it’s not great. It sounds like no one is at risk of missing the game, but again, not being sick before a Super Bowl would be super cool.
DeVonta Smith was limited on Thursday as well with a hamstring, but that’s nothing new for him. He’s a tough dude and he’ll probably play through whatever he’s got going on.
The last notable thing is that backup center Nick Gates is on the injury report. Both Brandon Graham and Britain Covey are still on the IR. If either of them is going to make it back onto the roster for Sunday, someone is going to have to get taken off the roster.
You have to imagine Gates would be the guy who would unfortunately get cut to make room given that he’s only been on the gameday roster one time since Week 10.
All in all, this isn’t terrible. The sickness thing is a bummer, but not a death sentence. The team has doctors and smart people who will be able to get these guys back up and ready to roll for Sunday.
At some point, news is going to come across the timeline that Brandon Graham was activated off of the IR, and that news is going to hit like huffing a five-gallon bucket of ammonia.
This will get updated with news after the Friday practice report comes out, so stay tuned.