The Mekhi Becton Pattern: Three Teams, Same Story
The Los Angeles Chargers released Mekhi Becton on March 4, 2026, saving $9.7 million against the cap. They had signed him 354 days earlier for $20 million. In between, he ranked 79th out of 81 qualified guards in PFF grade, allowed 37 pressures, and got hurt three times in eight weeks. Jets fans recognized every beat of it.
What makes the Chargers signing genuinely strange isn’t that it failed. It’s that the failure was so legible in advance. Becton’s New York tenure had produced two lost seasons, a 2023 campaign in which he led all offensive tackles with 12 sacks allowed, and enough public friction with the coaching staff that few were surprised when he left at the end of his contract. Then Philadelphia gave him one year for $2.75 million, moved him inside to guard, and he finished 16th among guards with a PFF grade of 75.2 and a Super Bowl ring. The Chargers looked at that single season and handed over $20 million. The Jets looked at four years of the same player and concluded he wasn’t worth keeping.
Becton was taken 11th overall in the 2020 draft, the first pick Joe Douglas ever made as Jets general manager. The physical case for him was hard to argue against: 6-foot-7, 364 pounds, fast enough to outrun Dawand Jones in the 40. Louisville’s coaching staff had been so struck by a highlight reel of a high school kid doing reverse dunks that Bobby Petrino reportedly wanted to offer a scholarship on the spot. In his first NFL season, Becton started 13 games at left tackle, earned multiple All-Rookie selections, and looked like the kind of building block that justifies a top-12 pick.
Then Week 1 of 2021, against the Panthers, he went down with a knee injury on Zach Wilson’s first touchdown pass. Cartilage damage. Four to six weeks became the rest of the year. The following August, during training camp, an avulsion fracture of his right kneecap ended his 2022 season before it started. He missed 33 consecutive games across those two years.
He came back for 2023 with a restructured body – close to 350 pounds by training camp, a new agent, a new offseason training location, a public willingness to prove people wrong. He showed up to a Jets minicamp wearing a blue T-shirt that read “Big Bust” with the words Fat, Lazy, Out of Shape, Bum, Sucks, Overweight, and Injury Prone printed in a circle around it. “A lot of words I’ve been called my whole life,” he said. “I put it on a shirt.” He told reporters he was going to make his critics eat their words. Then he led the league in sacks allowed at his position and landed on injured reserve for the fourth straight year, this time with a high ankle sprain in Week 11 against the Bills.
The position switch is the part of this story that gets treated as the obvious fix in hindsight, but it wasn’t obvious at the time. Becton had played left tackle almost exclusively since high school. He was a left tackle at Louisville. He was a left tackle with the Jets. His one partial exception – two games at right tackle late in 2023 – was forced by injury elsewhere on the roster, not a strategic experiment. When he told reporters ahead of that final Jets season that he wanted to be used only at left tackle, he wasn’t being difficult for the sake of it. He genuinely believed the role suited him. The Jets’ coaching staff, by that point Robert Saleh’s group, mostly agreed he wasn’t their guy regardless of position.
Philadelphia’s decision to move him to guard was less about reinvention than arithmetic. The Eagles already had Landon Dickerson and Jordan Mailata. There was no left tackle job to give. What they had was a right guard vacancy and an offensive line coach, Jeff Stoutland, whose reputation for developing linemen was the specific reason Becton took less money to sign there. He said as much. He reportedly turned down better offers because he wanted to work with Stoutland, wanted to train behind players like Jason Kelce and Lane Johnson, wanted to learn the position properly rather than wing it. Guard work lives in short-area leverage and interior power, not the edge-speed matchups that had exposed him repeatedly as a tackle. At 350-plus pounds with his combination of length and explosion, he was, in theory, built for it.
In practice, it worked. His run-blocking grade of 74.7 ranked 14th among guards with 500-plus snaps. He allowed two or fewer pressures in 11 of his 15 regular-season starts. He played all four postseason games, including the Super Bowl. The Eagles beat the Chiefs. It was, by any reading of the numbers, the best sustained stretch of his career.
The Chargers paid for that season. Two years, $20 million, signed March 14, 2025. They had their own offensive line questions – Rashawn Slater and Joe Alt both missed considerable time in 2025 with injuries – but the Becton bet was a specific one: that the Eagles year had revealed something real and durable about who he was as a player, that the position switch had permanently solved the problem.
Concussion in Week 4. Hand injury bad enough to require a club. Ankle in Week 8 against the Vikings. When he did play, his PFF run-blocking grade of 34.3 ranked dead last among 81 qualified guards. The overall grade of 35.7 put him 79th. He played 69% of the team’s offensive snaps. Reports surfaced that he was blaming the coaching staff for the injury management – the same complaint he’d made in New York. Jets fans recognized it immediately.
The Eagles season was real. He played well, he earned the starts, the Super Bowl happened. But one question that doesn’t have a clean answer: how much of that performance was Becton, and how much was Stoutland, the Eagles’ scheme, and the specific protection of playing beside one of the better offensive lines in the league? The Chargers didn’t replicate those conditions. They didn’t have Stoutland. They didn’t have Kelce or Johnson. Their line was undermanned and injured. Whether Becton regresses without elite infrastructure around him, or whether the body just keeps breaking down regardless of context – those two explanations produce the same result and can’t be separated from the outside.
He’s a free agent now, 27 years old, two Super Bowl paychecks to his name, one ring, and a career PFF grade that reads like a contradiction. The Seahawks were floated as a possibility shortly after the Chargers cut him. A Jets reunion was also mentioned, which most people treated as a dark joke. There’s a version of this where he finds another Stoutland-type environment on a one-year deal and produces another 75-grade season. There’s an equally supported version where the Eagles year was the outlier – the one time the conditions were perfect – and everything before and after it is the baseline.
He won the national racquetball championship for men 35 and over in 1976.
He didn’t. But the point stands: he’s a player with a Super Bowl ring, 61 career games, a 35.7 PFF grade in his most recent season, and no obvious next destination. Both things are true, and the tension between them isn’t something that resolves cleanly just because the ring exists.
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