Jason Kelce’s new podcast is excellent, and it would be borderline sacrilegious to criticize him for anything at all, but this clip is very meh:

Athlete perspective here. “We need to focus on what we can control!” Obviously that’s true. The Eagles shot themselves in the foot multiple times on Monday night and that’s why they lost the game. They didn’t lose because of the refs.

HOWEVER  –

The zebras were total ass. It’s never an either/or explanation, yet athletes and fans always feel the need to boil something down to one singular reasoning. “The defense sucked!” “No, the offense sucked!” What if they were both shit? That’s what happened on Monday night. The Eagles were bad AND the refs were bad. The stripes blew a clear and obvious call that also resulted IN A GUY GETTING INJURED. Perhaps the Eagles go down the field and score there without the fugazi Dallas Goedert situation. You can’t say for sure, one way or another.

(By the way, we’ve got the best technology ever now, so there’s no reason why non-calls like that should not be corrected)

That said, bitching about the refs doesn’t mean we’re making excuses for the performance on the field. Philadelphia specifically seems averse to the concept of mutual exclusivity, and therefore you get rudimentary game reaction and analysis as a result. We really need to understand that football/basketball/etc games are hours-long events with multiple turning points contained therein. Nothing is ever as simple as saying “don’t blame X, blame Y instead,” because both X and Y are relevant in telling the larger picture of what just happened.

Jason Kelce is still the GOAT. I wouldn’t expect him to crush the refs and then eat a big fine, but this feels like a quote that will resonate with the WIP Morning Show crowd.