The Kelce bloodstream keeps two teams flowing

Jason and Travis get through the Divisional round of the NFL playoffs.

Travis (left) and Jason Kelce

The Kelce brothers put in about seven hours of football on Saturday. That would be an average weekend day in Cleveland Heights, where they grew up, except it wouldn’t have been football. Jason was a pretty good hockey player, and Travis, two years younger, was just as inclined toward baseball. Ed and Donna, the parents, insisted on such variety, and football turned out to be the appropriate ticket for both: More challenging, more celebrating, more teammates to lead.

They won’t gather the accolades and the big bucks of the Manning brothers, but the Kelces are the Most Valuable Brothers playing today. They, too, have a podcast, and they’ve posed for GQ, and they’re part of the civic fabric in Philadelphia and Kansas City, top seeds in the NFC and AFC who won their Divisional Playoff games.

Center Jason has played 12 years and 176 games in Philadelphia and never has taken a snap anywhere else. Tight end Travis has played 144 games, every one in Kansas City. The Harbaugh brothers coached against each other in a Super Bowl, but no brothers have been on opposite sidelines of a Super Bowl as players. Some would consider a burden, but Jason and Travis has already won their world championships. To them, it would be just another sweaty Sunday.

Travis caught a career-high 14 passes, with two touchdowns, as the Chiefs beat Jacksonville, 27-20. Everyone knows about the telephatic connection between Kelce and Patrick Mahomes, but the quarterback had to leave the field with a sprained ankle in the first half, and Kelce was just as magnetic for backup Chad Henne. On a 98-yard drive that put the Chiefs up 17-7, Henne found Kelce four times, including the one-yard touchdown in a red zone, a 20-yard piece of property that Kelce has turned into his monarchy. No matter who is quarterbacking, Kelce finds the dead spaces in every defense, and drags the tacklers that he doesn’t elude. He had a career-high 12 touchdowns this season and, for his career, averages nine yards per target, not just per catch.

Jason was in the vortex of Philadelphia’s contemptuous 38-7 win over the Giants, a massive retort to those who thought the Eagles had lost their mojo in December and early January. There were fears that Kelce would be consumed by young, strong defensive lineman Dexter Lawrence, but Lawrence never hit quarterback Jalen Hurts, and he and the Giants were frog-marched for 268 yards rushing at 6.1 per clip.

The Eagles scored touchdowns in four of their first five possessions, and when it got to 27-0, coach Nick Sirianni ordered the team to line up for a 2-point possession. The Fox microphones caught him telling someone, “I know what the f—- I’m doing,” on the sidelines, and it turned out to be a ruse to prompt a neutral zone infraction, which never came. Yes, it’s difficult to beat a team three consecutive times, but the Eagles proved the corollary: It’s not so difficult when you’ve already beaten a team twice.

Jason turned 35 in November. He was born in 1987, which is why Travis wears No. 87. Travis turned 33 in October. Both went to the U. of Cincinnati. Both made the draftniks look bad. Jason was a sixth-round pick and Travis went in the third round. In an era when players begin planning their retirements when they sign their second contracts, Jason has put in 12 years and Travis 10, and they either play through injuries or scare them off. Each career is a repudiation of the way things are done in youth sports today, but don’t bother following their blueprint. They are fueled by love of the game, but only because football is the game they’re currently playing.

Jason was a linebacker and a fullback in high school, but while the top recruits were specializing, he was spending his summers doing everything else. He didn’t have a concentrated weight training regimen, so the recruiters weren’t enthralled. He came to Cincinnati as a walk-on and got a scholarship the next year, from new coach Brian Kelly, in exchange for Kelly’s request that he move to offense. He became a guard and then a center, and was all set for the Draft Combine when he came down with an illness that turned out to be appendicitis.

Still, Kelce put up the best 40 yard time of any center, and Howard Mudd, the Eagles’ assistant coach who is the one-man Library of Congress when it comes to line play, recommended him. Despite his sixth-round label, he started every game as a rookie.

Travis was the better high school player. His high school coach said he could have been all-Ohio in three sports. Cincinnati welcomed him as a quarterback. But Travis flunked a recreational drug test, and new coach Butch Jones suspended him for a year. Jason vouched for his brother and helped get him reinstated, and Travis became a renowned tight end. But he was so dangerous as a “wildcat” quarterback, handling direct snaps, that the coaches added a chapter in their playbook for him. In the Belk Bowl against Duke, he caught the game-winning, 83-yard touchdown pass.

His first year in Kansas City was also Andy Reid’s, and Travis was Kansas City’s leading receiver in three different seasons when Alex Smith was the quarterback. The year before that, Anthony Moeaki led Kansas City’s tight ends with 33 catches. (Nick Sirianni, now the Eagles’ coach, was the wide receiver coach on that staff.) In Reid’s second year, Kelce won the starting job and caught 67. Three times since, he has topped 100, including 110 in 2022.

Kansas City-Philadelphia would be a juicy Super Bowl, with stories abounding, particularly because Reid was nudged out of his job with the Eagles after he had won 10 or more games in nine of his 14 seasons, plus an NFC championship. But the Chiefs probably won’t get there unless Mahomes starts walking normally, because his knack for picking up first downs when all else is lost is the thing that distinguishes both he and the Chiefs. Kansas City also has lost its last three games to Cincinnati, which plays Buffalo Sunday.

No game is more attractive than Philadelphia-San Francisco. a collison of bighorn sheep, the top offense against the top defense, plus the leading sack team in the NFL going after 49ers rookie Brock Purdy. San Francisco has to deal with the Cowboys Sunday to make that happen.

At this point every team has multiple layers, as the Chiefs’ defense proved when it frustrated Trevor Lawrence on Saturday. But neither the Chiefs nor the Eagles know what it’s like to play without the brothers. They, and the Kelces, prefer it that way.