@thesportsontap: Tanner McKee has a Super Bowl ring and two career starts. Both came in the final game of a season, when nothing was on the line. Jalen Hurts is on injured reserve with a blood clot in his calf. Today McKee starts for the Eagles against the Panthers, and the job is his for at least a month. It is the first start of his life that actually matters. Here is the whole thing. At 16 a mole on his forehead came back positive for melanoma. A 16 year old in a surgical gown in a pre op room. Purple X marks on his forehead and his neck. Phone in his hand, scrolling scholarship offers. He looked at his mom and said this. "If they only knew." They cut it out. No chemotherapy. No radiation. Then he signed with Stanford. And then he left. McKee is a Latter day Saint, and he decided at eight years old that he would serve a mission. So at 18, with 30 scholarship offers sitting behind him, he got on a plane to Curitiba, Brazil for 21 months. Nick Saban told him Alabama would wait. He packed a football. For ten months it basically sat there. "I remember throwing the ball over power lines and little kids being all excited." The kids could not figure out why the ball was not round. He lost about 15 pounds of muscle. "I'm 100 percent missionary. I'm not too worried about how I'm going to come back as an athlete." Then a mission leader found a local semi pro team called the Coritiba Crocodiles and got them to practice with him. First they had to shoo chickens and roosters off a field with no lines on it. Now the honest part. He is 1 and 1 as a starter with under 600 passing yards in his entire NFL career. The Eagles are not handing him a month because he earned it. There is nobody else. But nobody else in that building put two football years down on purpose and then went and got them back. He learned Portuguese out there. His teammates call him the Mormon Missile. Today he finally gets a start that counts. #nfl #nflnews #eagles #flyeaglesfly #philadelphiaeagles

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Sunday 18 October 2026 15:07:14 GMT