For a Super Bowl winner with a long-term contract extension under his belt, Carson Wentz has faced some hefty questions during his first four years with the Eagles.
Will he ever show up in the playoffs? Does he play favorites? Was he jealous of Nick Foles' Super Bowl win?
It's a lot to handle while you're the face of the franchise, but right tackle Lane Johnson explained in an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show this week that he thinks Wentz is going to use the criticism to his advantage in 2020.
The Johnson interview begins around the 1:35:00 mark in the video below:
At one point during the show, McAfee asked Johnson a question that Eagles fans have turned over in their heads for years now: was Wentz jealous of Foles during the 2017 Super Bowl run?
Johnson was quick to answer:
NFL
MCAFEE: Was there anything weird behind the scenes, with Carson and Foles? Do you think Carson ever got jealous, at all, of the way things were going there?
JOHNSON: No, not jealous. I think he just wanted to be out there, really just set back from the injury. That's really it. He's such a workhorse in the weight room, everything he does, so there was that. I knew he was dying to be back out there, and that's really it, just because of the season he was having at the time.
It's a fair question, and one Wentz has faced plenty of times. He admitted back in 2018 that he had to "fight" the urge of jealousy while watching Foles excel.
But Johnson doesn't ever beat around the bush, so if he thinks Wentz ultimately won that fight, we certainly believe him.
Johnson also said the resulting criticism and hyper-microscope Wentz has played under since the Super Bowl win, despite having to play with less-than-helpful supporting casts, hasn't hurt the Eagles' QB.
If anything, Johnson said, he thinks it'll help Wentz this year:
He's just resilient. Throughout all the injuries and the criticism, he's never been battered, or shown any signs of it getting to him.
I think he stays so busy, and is so consumed with what he does, that he drowns out a lot of distractions. And he likes to prove naysayers wrong, with this year, a lot of questions coming in, and he did what he did with limited cast members out there. I think that speaks volumes, and I think moving forward he's going to have that edge to him.
It's always cool to see Wentz's teammates go to bat for him, when questions have swirled about whether he has the ear of the locker room.
And if Wentz can have a healthy receiving corps, plus a few more pieces added through the draft (or trade?), that extra "edge" will be all the more useful in 2020.
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