The Philadelphia Eagles’ offensive line is historically large—and they’re out to flatten the Kansas City Chiefs

Illustration: Nathan Hackett

By Joshua Robinson, Andrew Beaton and Rosie Ettenheim – Feb. 4, 2025 5:30 am ET – Wall Street Journal

NEW ORLEANS—For most of this NFL season, Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley has looked like a one-man highlight reel.

He’s led his team to the Super Bowl. He’s sprinted for over 2,000 yards. He once jumped over a defender backwards.

But Barkley’s heroics are hardly a solo project. If it seems like he’s always bursting into daylight, it’s only because the offensive line showing him the way happens to be the biggest group of wrecking balls in the history of this game. 

Offensive linemen are typically the largest players in football, but even by those standards, the Eagles are positively ginormous. Their five starting linemen, on average, stand at 6-foot-6 and weigh 338 pounds. By comparison, they’re more than an inch taller, and 26 pounds heavier, than their counterparts on the Kansas City Chiefs. 

In fact, Philadelphia’s starters make up the tallest and heaviest offensive line in Super Bowl history. 

It means that as the Chiefs try to win their third consecutive title, they don’t just have to keep up with Barkley’s breakneck speed and lightning-fast moves. They also have to avoid being flattened by the most daunting collection of man-mountains this game has ever seen. 

The Eagles’ offensive linemen are both the tallest and heaviest in Super Bowl history

“They scout some big guys around here,” Eagles offensive tackle Lane Johnson says.

To understand what makes those big guys such enormous outliers, it helps to look at two of Philadelphia’s stars on the offensive line. The first is Jordan Mailata, who is so huge that he looks like he should be playing an entirely different sport—which he did. The 6-foot-8, 365-pound Australian was a promising rugby league player in Sydney before the Eagles took a flier on him in the seventh round of the 2018 NFL draft. This year, he was a second-team All-Pro.

The other is Mekhi Becton, who is large enough to support three different size-based nicknames: Big Ticket, Highway 77, and Mount Becton. He was drafted in the first round by the New York Jets to play tackle in 2020, but struggled with his fitness as his weight ballooned to 400 pounds. Since joining the Eagles on a one-year contract last spring, the 6-foot-7, 363-pound Becton has slimmed back and found a home at right guard, where he blasts open gaps for Barkley. 

“I like unusual players,” said Eagles line coach Jeff Stoutland. “If you’re really big and long and hard to get around, and I put two or three or four guys next to each other like that, then how the heck are you going to squeak your way through?” 

In a sport of enormous humans, Eagles linemen Mekhi Becton and Jordan Mailata still manage to dwarf their competitors on the field. Between them, they weigh more than a Harley-Davidson, and the Chiefs’ star defensive tackle Chris Jones is 50 pounds lighter than each of them. But to truly understand how large they are, it helps to place them next to some of the greatest athletes in other sports.

Simone Biles is the most decorated gymnast of all-time—and she managed to pull off her spectacular array of twists, turns and flips while standing just 4-foot-8. Fellow American Suni Lee also won an Olympic all-around competition, and she’s barely 5 foot. Even standing on their tiptoes, they’d barely reach the numbers on Becton and Mailata’s uniforms.

Soccer GOATs Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are seen as polar opposites inside their sport. Messi is the 5-foot-7 dribbling wizard whose low center of gravity helps him dance past defenders, while Ronaldo is a 6-foot-2 paragon of athleticism. But opposite the enormous Eagles, they’re just two skinny guys who play the wrong kind of football.

Despite lacking dominant physical traits, Stephen Curry and Caitlin Clark have transformed basketball through their ability to drain shots from far-flung spots on the floor. Curry, 6-foot-2 and 185 pounds, is far slighter than most of his peers. The 6 foot Clark, who’s 152 pounds, is the second lightest player on the Indiana Fever—but that didn’t stop her from leading the team in scoring.

No one benefits more from the sheer size of Philadelphia’s giants than the two guys who spend their time lining up behind them. Jalen Hurts, whose 6-foot-1 frame is relatively diminutive for a quarterback, has made a specialty of running quarterback sneaks with their help. And running back Saquon Barkley has posted over 2,000 rushing yards this season charging into the space they create.

None of this was an accident. Offensive linemen have been expanding throughout football history. And the Eagles, who have long been at the forefront of the sport’s newest trends, have taken it to the next level. The result: Philadelphia has run for over 500 yards over its last two playoff wins en route to this Super Bowl.

What makes this group so special is that these Eagles aren’t merely gargantuan—after all, NFL history is littered with hulking linemen who were too slow-footed to keep up with defenders. These Eagles have also proved light enough on their feet to keep the danger away from Barkley.

And while the spectacular nature of Barkley’s work is obvious, even to the untrained eye, the NFL’s advanced metrics make it clear how much help he has gotten along the way. 

This season, the Eagles led the NFL with 2,011 rushing yards before the ball carrier ran into an opposing defender—190 yards more than any other team. On Barkley’s runs, he averaged 3.8 yards before contact per rush, meaning that he has so much space that he’s gaining huge chunks of territory before anyone even lays a hand on him. 

That marked the highest yards before contact for any running back with 1,000 yards in a season since at least 2016, according to Pro Football Reference. By contrast, Derrick Henry, the NFL’s second-leading rusher this year, averaged just 3.1 yards pre-contact. 

It’s the ultimate sign of how Barkley’s elusiveness and the Eagles’ run-block prowess have combined to form such a devastating attack. Now, they’re attempting to become the first Super Bowl champion in over a decade to run the ball more than half the time. 

And by reviving a ground game that had gone out of style, the team that helped popularize going for it on fourth down has shown that it’s still operating at football’s cutting edge. At a time when offensive linemen were getting bigger across the league, Philadelphia took the trend to its logical extreme. 

Back when the Chiefs took on the Green Bay Packers in the first Super Bowl, the starting offensive linemen on those teams weighed an average of 252.1 pounds and not one cracked 275, according to Stats. 

Even some of the game’s all-time great blockers now seem diminutive by comparison. Art Shell (6-foot-5, 265 pounds) and Gene Upshaw (6-foot-5, 255 pounds) formed the famous left side of the Raiders’ line, but would easily get mistaken for tight ends today. 

The Eagles, who are on average 8 pounds heavier than any other offensive line in Super Bowl history, take immense pride in their sheer volume. They are some of the only athletes who can make their corner of Philadelphia’s sprawling locker room feel snug. Still, they insist that it isn’t enough to be humongous just for the sake of being humongous. 

“We know,” Becton says, “the main goal is to just dominate the people in front of us.”

Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com, Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com and Rosie Ettenheim at rosie.ettenheim@wsj.com

Appeared in the February 5, 2025, print edition as ‘The Super Bowl Has Never Seen Anything This Big’.