Foles was a seriously good basketball player in high school, and he plays football like he’s still on the court, sliding and dishing like a point guard. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three . . . and the ball is out. that explains his success? On Sunday, according to the football analyst Sam Monson, seventy per cent of Foles’s passes were thrown in 2.5 seconds or less, twenty per cent faster than the next-quickest Q.B. Is there something about Foles’s style of playing Q.B. Miked up on the sidelines during the 2018 Super Bowl, Foles sounds more like Napoleon Dynamite than General Maximus directing the troops. As a leader, he is a doer, not an exhorter. On the field, he has no obvious rare athletic endowments that explain his success only in the locker room, it is said by his teammates, is his special gift apparent, earning him his rude Philly nickname. His throwing motion is a languid shrug, and his passes carve loopy, floaty arcs that seem certain to be intercepted until they settle softly into his receivers’ hands.

hero like Nick Foles? He looks more like a mall employee than a gridiron icon, a skinny and sallow fellow with a Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo-like bearing. But now the people want to know how the story ends . . . ” Indeed, we do. who became a backup, and who then became a real-life Rocky-a disrespected has-been who quit the game, only to come back to win it all in 2018, and who is now defying the nonbelievers again.Īll the script needs is a few lines like those from Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” to fluff the story into Hollywood dimensions: “The general who became a slave. Foles is the Eagles’ onetime franchise Q.B.

Post!”Īfter the screaming ended and the emotions cooled (“You kind of smell,” my wife told me later, on hugging me after the victory) and Harry had gone back to playing Fortnite, I was left on the couch to ponder the mystery and wonder of the Eagles’ quarterback, Nicholas Edward Foles, the twenty-nine-year-old six-feet-six Texan from Austin’s Westlake High School. The first “doink” showed in his eyes-they got wide and incredulous-and by the time Cris Collinsworth announced, hashtagishly, “Double Doink!,” I had turned back to the screen for the replay, while Harry picked up his phone and caught his crazy father screaming, “It. I watched his face as he watched the kick fly across the TV screen. I turned away from the screen, put my hands on my son Harry’s shoulders, muttered something about winning or losing together as a family, and prepared for the worst.

Believe It by Nick Foles