Quarterback Nick Foles: The Backup Who Won Philadelphia Its First Super Bowl
On February 4, 2018, Nick Foles lined up at the goal line – not as a quarterback, not as a blocker, but as a receiver. Fourth down. Less than two minutes to halftime. The Eagles trailed by one. Tight end Trey Burton took the snap, looked right, and hit Foles in the back of the end zone. The Eagles went into the locker room up 22–12. They never lost the lead again. Final score: Philadelphia 41, New England 33. Foles was named MVP. The franchise had waited 85 years for that moment, and it arrived via a trick play called by a backup quarterback who had seriously considered never playing football again.
From Austin to Arizona: The Part of the Story Nobody Tells
Foles grew up in Austin, Texas, where he played at Westlake High School – the same school Drew Brees had attended years earlier. By the time Foles graduated in 2007, he had thrown for 5,658 yards and 56 touchdowns, erasing most of the passing records Brees had set. He was also a legitimate basketball player, a three-year starter who led his district in rebounding as a sophomore and was recruited by Georgetown, Arizona State, and Baylor. He told all of them no – football was the plan.
He committed to Michigan State and arrived in East Lansing in 2007, only to find himself third on a depth chart behind Brian Hoyer and Kirk Cousins. He appeared in one game against UAB – five-of-eight for 57 yards – and decided that staying made no sense. He transferred to Arizona, sat out 2008 under the redshirt rule, and then won the starting job in 2009 when Willie Tuitama graduated. He didn’t take it on the first try. Matt Scott beat him in the spring competition. Foles got his shot after Scott struggled early in the season and never gave it back.
His Arizona career ended with a 19-19 record and enough film to interest NFL scouts without exciting them. The Eagles took him 88th overall in the 2012 draft – third round, the kind of selection that buys a guy three or four years to figure out whether he belongs. Philadelphia already had Michael Vick. Foles was brought in to hold a clipboard and develop.
2013: The Season That Made No Statistical Sense
Vick got hurt in Week 5 of 2013. Foles took over and did something that still reads as a misprint when you see it on a stat sheet: 27 touchdowns, 2 interceptions, 119.0 passer rating across 10 starts. The touchdown-to-interception ratio surpassed Tom Brady’s then-existing single-season record. He led the NFL that year in passer rating, yards per attempt, yards per completion, touchdown percentage, and interception percentage – all five categories simultaneously, in a season he didn’t even start.
The game everyone remembers from that year was November 3, at Oakland. Foles threw seven touchdown passes. Zero interceptions. His passer rating was a perfect 158.3 – he literally could not have performed better under the formula. He threw more touchdowns than incompletions that afternoon. It was only his ninth NFL start. Seven TD games had happened before – Peyton Manning did it, Y.A. Tittle did it, a handful of others – but Foles is one of only three quarterbacks to throw seven and finish with a perfect rating. He won NFC Offensive Player of the Week. The following week against Green Bay, his rating was 149.3. No quarterback had ever posted back-to-back games above 149.
The Eagles won the NFC East that season and lost in the Wild Card to New Orleans on a late field goal, 26–24. Foles was fine in that game – 195 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions – but the season ended anyway, and for a brief window he had looked like one of the best quarterbacks in football. What happened next is the honest part of the story that tends to get omitted in the warm retrospectives.
The Collarbone, the Rams, and Almost Walking Away
In Week 9 of 2014, Foles broke his collarbone against Houston. Six games into a season where he had genuinely looked like the Eagles’ long-term answer, he was done. Mark Sanchez finished the year. After the season, the Eagles traded Foles to St. Louis in a package deal for Sam Bradford – two quarterbacks swapped on two franchises that were unsure about both of them.
The 2015 Rams season was bad. He went 4-7 as a starter before being benched for Case Keenum. The Rams used the first overall pick in 2016 on Jared Goff. Foles asked for his release and got it on July 27, 2016. He had been openly thinking about retiring. He said later that he went roughly eight months without picking up a football – that the love of the game had completely drained out. “I wanted to retire,” he told YouVersion’s Bible app in 2017. “I struggled. I couldn’t pick up a football for about eight months. I had no love for the game, and it was tough.”
What brought him back was a fly-fishing trip and Andy Reid. The Chiefs signed Foles in August 2016 as a backup to Alex Smith – a one-year deal worth $1.75 million. He played in two games, went 20-of-33 for 187 yards and a touchdown in a Week 9 win over Jacksonville when Smith got hurt, and showed enough that Kansas City considered bringing him back. They ultimately didn’t. But playing for Reid – who has a well-documented ability to help quarterbacks rediscover their confidence – reset something. Foles returned to Philadelphia in 2017 in a completely different frame of mind than when he had left. He has said that season with Reid was directly responsible for what happened next.
Carson Wentz Goes Down, and Everything Changes
The Eagles were 11-2 and looked like the best team in the NFC when Wentz tore his ACL against the Rams on December 10, 2017. Wentz had been the frontrunner for NFL MVP. The Eagles were the NFC’s top seed. And now a backup quarterback who had almost quit the sport entirely was going to carry a Super Bowl contender through the playoffs.
His three regular-season starts after the injury were not encouraging. He completed just 54 percent of his passes at 5.1 yards per attempt and didn’t complete a single throw longer than 20 yards. Entering the playoffs, the concern about Foles was legitimate – not fabricated by media pessimists, but grounded in what he had actually shown. The team was shaky. “No one thought we were going to be here after Carson went down,” tight end Zach Ertz said before the Super Bowl.
What happened over the next four weeks is one of the stranger stretches of quarterback play in postseason history. Against Atlanta in the divisional round, Foles completed 23 passes for 246 yards and they won 15-10 – not a performance that would stop traffic, but efficient enough. Against Minnesota in the NFC Championship, he threw for 352 yards and three touchdowns in a 38-7 rout. At some point during warmups before that game, Foles paused and just watched the crowd. He mentioned it at his retirement ceremony seven years later. Then came Super Bowl LII.
Super Bowl LII, By the Numbers and Beyond Them
Foles finished 28-of-43 for 373 yards, three touchdowns, one interception, and one receiving touchdown on the Philly Special. His final line was the best ever by a quarterback in a losing effort – except he wasn’t in a losing effort. Brady threw for 505 yards that night and lost. The Patriots had taken a 33-32 lead with 9:22 remaining on a Brady-to-Gronkowski touchdown. With 5:39 left, the Eagles faced fourth-and-two on their own 45-yard line.
Foles, under pressure from defensive tackle Malcolm Brown, lobbed a pass over traffic to Ertz for a two-yard gain and a first down. Ertz scored the go-ahead touchdown on the next series. That fourth-down completion on their own side of the field, trailing in a Super Bowl, is one of three such plays in the game’s history – and Foles’ is the only one that ended in a win. Bill Belichick coached 44 playoff games with the Patriots. Foles was the only quarterback to throw for 370 yards and three touchdowns against him in any of them.
One detail that didn’t come out until Frank Reich mentioned it years later: Foles played the entire 2017 postseason with a painful elbow. He had missed significant time in training camp because of it. His arm strength was limited in ways that almost no one on the outside knew. The postseason numbers – 72.6 percent completion rate, 9.2 yards per attempt, six touchdowns, one interception, 115.7 passer rating – were produced while he was hurt. The one interception came off Alshon Jeffery’s hands in the Super Bowl, a drop before it became a turnover. The statistical case for the run being genuinely historic holds up even with full context.
His second-half performances across the three wins are worth isolating: 38-of-47 for 447 yards, four touchdowns, zero interceptions, 134.7 passer rating in the second halves of the NFC divisional game, NFC Championship, and Super Bowl combined. His career postseason passer rating after halftime – 107.4, across a minimum of 100 attempts – is the highest in NFL history. That number doesn’t just count 2017; it’s a career figure, which means it survived Jacksonville, Chicago, and Indianapolis dragging it down.
After the Super Bowl: Jacksonville, Chicago, Indianapolis, and the End
Foles opted out of his Eagles contract in February 2019 and signed a four-year, $88 million deal with Jacksonville – more than $50 million guaranteed. He broke his collarbone on the first play of the first game of the 2019 season. He came back and started four games that year, went 0-4, and the Jaguars traded him to Chicago in March 2020 for a compensatory fourth-round pick.
He started seven games for the Bears in 2020, went 2-5, and spent 2021 largely as Justin Fields’ backup. The Colts signed him in May 2022 to serve behind Matt Ryan. When the Indianapolis season collapsed – Frank Reich was fired, Jeff Saturday came in as interim coach – Foles started Weeks 16 and 17. He got hurt in Week 17 and didn’t return. That was his last NFL appearance. He spent the entire 2023 season unsigned. In August 2024, he made it official.
The career line: 71 games, 14,227 passing yards, 82 touchdowns, 47 interceptions, 86.2 passer rating. As a starter he went 29-29 overall. The overall record is genuinely misleading. In Philadelphia, he went 21-11. Outside Philadelphia – with St. Louis, Kansas City, Jacksonville, Chicago, and Indianapolis combined – he went 8-18. He was not the same quarterback in different places, and the numbers make that stark.
The Eagles Records He Left Behind
No Eagle has worn number 9 since Foles left after the 2018 season. His franchise records include the highest career passer rating in Eagles history at 93.2, the lowest interception percentage in Eagles history at 1.9 percent, the most 400-yard games in franchise history with four, and the single-game passing record of 471 yards against Houston in 2018. His 9.1 yards per attempt in 2013 is still the best single-season mark in Eagles history.
A Philly Special statue stands outside Lincoln Financial Field. That says more than the passer rating does. When Foles returned on September 16, 2024 – signing a ceremonial one-day contract to retire as an Eagle – he joined Jason Kelce on the Monday Night Countdown stage, put on the underdog dog mask that became the symbol of the 2017-18 Eagles, and got teary in a press conference while talking about his parents. He said he wanted his legacy to be “that I helped my teammates be better. Not just as players, but as people.” Then he mentioned the NFC Championship warmups, and looking at the crowd, and realizing how fortunate he was. He’d said some version of that before. He seemed to mean it every time.
Faith, Family, and What He Does Now
Foles married Tori Moore in 2014. Tori is the younger sister of former Eagles tight end Evan Moore – the two were briefly teammates in 2012, which is a strange detail. They have two children: daughter Lily, born in 2017, and a son born in June 2020. Foles coaches Lily’s flag football team. His hat at the retirement ceremony read “DAD, No Days Off,” which is part of the DadSzn brand he built with former Bears punter Pat O’Donnell.
The faith dimension of Foles’ public identity has been consistent for years, not something he discovered in retirement. During the 2017 offseason – before the Super Bowl run, before any of it – he enrolled in seminary classes at Liberty University. He said at the time that he wanted to become a high school pastor. His 2018 autobiography, “Believe It: My Journey of Success, Failure, and Overcoming the Odds,” debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list. He donated the proceeds to charity. His post-football plans – ministry, fatherhood, the podcast he co-hosts – were things he had been building toward for years while he was still playing, which makes the retirement feel less like an ending than the completion of a long transition he had started somewhere around 2016, on a river, with a fly rod in his hands and no interest in picking up a football.
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