Jason Kelce’s decision to retire from the NFL was not one the 13-year veteran center made quickly — or took lightly.
“I’ll be very honest, the last four years I wanted to retire at the end of the season,” Kelce told PEOPLE exclusively while discussing his partnership with Kingsford, teaming up with MVP Vince Wilfork for the “King of Barbecue” campaign.
He adds: “The reality is that it’s really hard to get there. Even after we lost the Super Bowl, I wanted to come back and play for another Super Bowl. But to imagine another 17 games at the top of the playoffs and come back was very hard to imagine.”
Still, the former Philadelphia Eagles star (36) realized last season was different from previous campaigns.
“Those last three years, I felt like I still had it in me and I still wanted to and I could still play at the level I felt I wanted to play and go out there and compete,” he says. “And after leaving this year, it was more and more obvious after the season that my body was telling me to stop. I don’t think I could play another season the way I want to and the way that makes me happy.”
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Jason Kelce for Kingsford.
Courtesy of Kingsford
He continues, “If I’m going to be completely honest, even last year sometimes it wasn’t what I wanted, and that’s partly because of where my body was. So all those things culminated in a decision.”
The will-they-won’t-they narrative plagued Kelce during his final season, and it was the main theme of his Prime Video documentary, Kelcewhich premiered in September 2023.
But for the husband and father of three young daughters, the decision to finally retire came as a “relief,” he says.
“Yeah, I mean, no matter what decision you make, when it’s weighing you down, there’s going to be relief,” Kelce tells PEOPLE. “So a year before the documentary with my wife and I, it was an incredible relief to announce that I’m playing again because I’m not going back and forth on this thing that seems to be hanging over your head. The same thing happened this year when I decided it was time to retire. It was an incredible relief to not have to rack my brain over what the right decision was or what I wanted to do.”
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He adds: “But what was different about this year was when it came to officially announcing it publicly, it was incredibly nerve-wracking and nerve-racking to the max. And so I felt relieved and finally made the decision privately.”
Despite the Eagles’ frustrating season, which ended with a wild-card playoff loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Kelce says he waited until the final game to finally announce his intentions.
“I don’t think you can realistically make an exact decision and I don’t want to speak for everyone,” he says. “I guess some people probably know when it’s the middle of the season that they can’t do it anymore. But for me, I feel like to really be in the right space to make that kind of decision, you have to be a little bit away from football. You have to recharge and kind of figure out where you are at the end of the year.”
The Ohio native’s emotional retirement speech on March 4 lasted 45 minutes, where the athlete – dressed in a black Eagles tank top and flip flops – tearfully announced his retirement from professional football.
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Jason Kelce for Kingsford.
Courtesy of Kingsford
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As his family, including his wife Kylie, brother Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, mother Donna Kelce and father Ed Kelce, looked on, Jason spoke from his heart — and those were the feelings that began when he started jotting them down in the Notes app on his phone.
“Every now and then I write down little things almost like a diary, and a lot of those things were key moments and glimpses of my career during my time in the NFL and things that I used to write down and record,” he says. “So a lot of it was reading Kylie, one thing for myself to feel what it actually sounded like while I was saying it. Two, trying to figure out how to organize all those thoughts.”
He adds, “At first it’s just a jumble of a bunch of different things that don’t really have the flow of what it would take to make a speech. So you’re trying to figure out how to figure out which ones go where, which ones do we leave? So Kylie was definitely instrumental in trying to decide all of those things .I think you end up having all these different thoughts and ideas that sound good to you or might make sense to you, but at the end of the day, that’s the whole reason you’re talking, and then I’ve read it to other people, really. felt comfortable going up and saying it publicly.”
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Kelce has new projects that will continue to keep him in the public eye, such as his partnership with Kingsford and his new appearance on Monday Night Football.
But don’t expect older brother Kelce — who is routinely seen at the Eagles’ practice facility for what he calls a “great weight room” and “free food” — to give up his love of the game.
“I played a long time in the NFL,” he says. “For the most part, I couldn’t experience it as a fan. So obviously I’ll be working Monday nights, but that means Sundays are open and Thursdays are open. So I got a bit of time to potentially look at the actual matchday atmosphere from a different lens now that the playing days are behind me.”
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Source: HIS Education