Jason Kelce retired on March 4, 2024. His long-rumored exit from the NFL came after 13 years at center for the Philadelphia Eagles. He’ll likely make the Pro Football Hall of Fame. As chronicled in the 2023 documentary Kelce, he married Philadelphia native Kylie McDevitt; they still live in the Philadelphia suburbs. Kelce played center, so he was basically anonymous to anyone but hardcore football fans until his rousing speech at the Super Bowl victory parade in 2018. He donned a Mummers costume and listed the many ways people doubted the Eagles. It was pretty great. It earned him a lifetime of admiration in the city and put him on a trajectory for a much bigger profile outside of it.
Kelce has indeed stayed retired from the sport, but he has not gone away. He has become not just the most famous interior lineman in American public life by a wide margin, but a mostly inescapable fixture during NFL broadcasts and a completely inescapable one during the commercial breaks in NFL broadcasts, where he banters with his brother or his mom or the CGI buffalo mascot of Buffalo Wild Wings. He has continued to co-host one of the most popular sports podcasts, New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce, which launched in September of 2022. He contributed to a third Christmas album featuring the Philadelphia offensive line; one song on A Philly Special Christmas Party was a duet with Kelce and Stevie Nicks. He got involved in a match at WrestleMania 40 in Philly. He smashed some asshole’s phone. He and Kylie Kelce were harangued down the shore by a drunk lady. Kylie now has a popular podcast, too.
But mostly, Kelce has slid into a role as an ESPN analyst. The Hollywood Reporter called him “arguably the hottest media [free] agent of the NFL offseason,” so presumably he’s raking in that Disney cash. His main job is on Monday Night Countdown, where Kelce is one of four co-hosts, alongside four contributors and also Adam Schefter. People seemed to like him when he debuted in August. But familiarity breeds contempt, or at least exhaustion, and after one full season of Maximum Kelce, there’s a bit of fatigue setting in. You can feel it on the late-night talk show that ESPN gave him, which is called They Call It Late Night with Jason Kelce.
So, yes, this is a lot of Jason Kelce—enough that it took two of us here at Defector to properly analyze his first season of retirement. We’ve gathered representatives of the McQuade (East) Coast and the Ratto (West) Coast, Dan McQuade and Ray Ratto, to talk through it.
Dan: What’s up, Ray? Every third business in Philadelphia sells some piece of bootleg Jason Kelce merchandise, so I obviously have a much more localized opinion of the man. He is everywhere at every opportunity. I also have incredibly fond memories of him as a football player, of course. What’s been your opinion on him?
Ray: I’ve had pretty much all I can use for awhile. Kind of how I feel about all the Mannings. I bring this up first because Kelce is slowly but surely obliterating my memories of him as a player with his insistence on inserting his beetle-browed mush into my eyeline every 19 minutes.
Dan: I have been watching his talk show. Well, I have been trying to watch it. I got through 17 minutes of the first episode of They Call It Late Night before my wife asked if we could watch an old episode of America’s Next Top Model instead. It’s the season with a challenge where the contestants pose at Ellis Island with child models dressed as early-19th century immigrants, so you can guess the level of entertainment the Jason Kelce talk show brought me.
My wife had a lot of comments on the 17 minutes we watched, though. Her primary takeaway was: “There are so many good ideas for jokes. But it’s just so amateurish.” I am not an actor, but I appeared in Roth and Roth: A Cardboard Cutout’s Journey and yet I delivered my “It’s kinda like Wingstop, but for beef” line with the gravitas of Philadelphian Charlton Heston. Still, I can see how someone who isn't a trained on-camera presence might have a hard time making a transition like this. And I would agree there are some good ideas, even though the first episode opens with Kelce talking to a personified Eagles stadium. But the show is just so rote. Guests in the first episode included Kylie Kelce, Jimmy Kimmel, Charles Barkley, and Lil Dicky. Finally, a chance to see all these people on TV!
Ray: I like the pod with Travis because it isn’t scripted. Everything else Kelce does, from the ads to the ESPN appearances and now to this thing, seems like someone else’s idea of who and what he should be and say. And since those people are largely lampreys who should be scraped free of their moorings and shot into a giant furnace, they have no business trying to explain Jason Kelce to Jason Kelce. I mean, he’s a goofy enough lout on his own, so leave him be.
That isn’t the ESPN way, though; only a very precious few get to avoid the pre-programmed talk-about-the-Cowboys-all-the-time direction that helped inspire the national craze of cord-cutting. But he’s screwed now because he can’t even do the bellowing tanktop doof routine since Pat McAfee already copyrighted that. So he can either cash his ridiculous checks and fake his way through the desk talk, or maintain his artistic integrity and give up his dream of a vacation lodge in Quebec.
It is interesting that ESPN, which used to be Boston-centric, has always been New York-centric, and has also tried to colonize Miami (Le Batard), Washington (Kornheiser-Wilbon), and even Atlanta, has finally seized upon the mutant subterranean culture of Philadelphia. May the galactic pixies have mercy on their forfeit souls. Kelce should be allowed to rise above mere geography, but instead ESPN’s weird fixation on shoving everything into separate civic boxes undercuts whatever his skill set actually is, or could be.
Dan: One of the very first things Kelce says in the premiere is about breaking free of the Philadelphia mindset and presenting things to everyone, followed by a shot of a mostly Eagles-centric crowd. Note: This crowd was not Eagles-centric enough to recognize and properly cheer legendary Eagles WR Harold Carmichael, who had a little sketch early in the show. Carmichael was before my time, and way before that of the audience for this show, but also, come on. They trot him out at games all the time! His hands are the size of dumpsters! He was an incredible football player. You should know this guy.
Ray: As for the show, it’s standard-issue lame, forgettable the moment it stopped inserting itself into my family room. Too produced (a fucking house band?), too overtly and stiffly written (Kelce delivers his lines the way a beer truck driver delivers palettes of Yuengling—grudgingly), and casual only when placed in context with Ryan Seacrest’s Wheel Of Fortune turn. In the world of podcasts, where nobody gets introduced from offstage and there’s no place to put a band, this all feels too extruded, a shelf-stable product forced into cans and shipped off in bulk to grocery stores. I’ve watched most of the episodes already aired, and I have been gratified mostly by the fact that they all eventually end. It’s not bad nor good, and it isn’t Below Deck, which is beyond good and evil, but it does not separate itself from anything else Disney does. At least the podcast seems genuine, whether it is or not.
In sum, your bride’s words about going to sleep early resonated with me; my wife wouldn’t watch because she knows life is short. Jan clearly knows comedy.
Dan: And yet I think Kelce could recover from all of this. The talk show is probably not going to work, but he obviously knows football, and he really is personable and seems like the kind of guy who would work to continue to improve on television. Hopefully he'll stay in touch with the game so he doesn’t fall off like Tony Romo did when he wasn’t fresh off retirement. Or not! He could just decide to change course and ride off into the Philadelphia sunset, staying a local hero here while his wife begins her turn toward stardom.
Ray: My advice to him? Take no advice. He can’t keep up with the game because it changes too much too quickly, and showbiz is seriously too weird for anyone sane. But he’s probably right to cash out while he can, with his family as part of the comedy troupe, and let the business die in his rearview mirror as he drives to his retreat in the Carolinas, pitching empties out the sun roof and talking the cops out of citing him for littering.
Dan: Another funny thing my wife said was, “This should ruin talk shows in the way Xanadu ruined musical movies.”
