Lane Johnson: Two Super Bowl Rings, Zero Sacks in 2024, and a Career That’s Still Not Done
From Groveton, Texas to the Fourth Overall Pick
Groveton, Texas has around 1,000 people in it. Lane Johnson grew up there, played quarterback at Groveton High School, and competed in the shot put at the 2008 UIL 1A State Championships – fourth place, with a throw of 15.21 meters. Nobody was writing him up as a future NFL All-Pro. He wasn’t even playing offensive tackle yet.
He started at Kilgore College after high school, a small community college in East Texas, before transferring to Oklahoma. That’s where everything accelerated – and, by his own account, where things got harder than anyone watching from the outside could see. Oklahoma runs like a professional operation, and Johnson has said that the pressure there was the period when his anxiety hit worst. “It was hard for me to function,” he’s said. “I lost my appetite and felt like my personality was taken from me.” He was showing up to workouts, going to class, and quietly falling apart.
He still went fourth overall in the 2013 NFL Draft. The Eagles signed him to a four-year, $19.85 million deal with a $12.81 million signing bonus. He entered training camp behind veteran Dennis Kelly, then Kelly had back surgery, and Johnson was the starter from week one. He started all 16 games that rookie season, helped Philadelphia finish 10-6, and was graded 26th among right tackles by Pro Football Focus. Not a superstar entrance. Solid. The kind of rookie year that tells you someone can play, not necessarily that they’ll be an All-Pro a decade later.
The Suspensions, and What Came After
In June 2014, Johnson tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and was suspended for the first four games of the season. He came back and allowed one sack the rest of the year, was graded second among right tackles by PFF, and made the PFF All-Pro team. Two years later, a second violation brought a ten-game suspension. That one stung harder.
Johnson has been direct about where he stands on this: he’s said the suspensions should complicate any Hall of Fame consideration. He’s also been sharp about the institutional failure that made the situation worse – after the second suspension, he publicly criticized the NFLPA for not making clear which supplements were and weren’t permitted. The criticism was fair. Multiple players have faced the same confusion over the years, and the league’s supplement guidance has historically been vague enough to create genuine ambiguity.
Worth noting: the PED suspensions and the anxiety disorder have never been publicly connected by Johnson. But he played through years of pre-game panic attacks, a sport with enormous financial and social pressure on performance, in a system that wasn’t well-equipped to support mental health. Whatever weight you assign to that context, it’s there.
Building the Case for Greatest Right Tackle in NFL History
After the 2016 suspension ended, Johnson rebuilt with a consistency that became almost hard to track because nothing dramatic happened – he just stopped losing. From Week 11 of the 2020 season through the end of the 2024 regular season, he did not allow a sack. In 2022-23, playing through a torn adductor muscle that needed surgical repair days after Super Bowl LVII, he didn’t give one up in 1,176 snaps across 18 games, including playoff matchups against the Giants, 49ers, and Chiefs.
The 2024 season was the clearest statement. Zero sacks allowed in 413 pass-blocking snaps. One quarterback hit. A knockdown rate of 0.2% – the lowest among all NFL offensive tackles, per PFF, which graded him at 82.4 overall and fourth among tackles at the position. He turned 34 during that season. The Eagles won Super Bowl LIX in February 2025, with Jalen Hurts protected and Saquon Barkley running for what finished as one of the best rushing seasons in NFL history – 2,005 yards, breaking Eric Dickerson’s single-season record. Johnson was on the right side for most of it.
That summer, the Associated Press polled eight pro football writers to rank the top five offensive tackles heading into 2025. Johnson came out first. Teammate Jordan Mailata was second, Tristan Wirfs third, Penei Sewell fourth, Trent Williams fifth. Three of Johnson’s eight first-place votes, four thirds. Offensive line analyst Brandon Thorn, who studies the position more carefully than most, wrote that the conversation about Johnson being the best right tackle of all time should start “sooner rather than later.” His post-merger Mount Rushmore of right tackles includes Jackie Slater and a handful of others. Johnson is now in that conversation in a way that wasn’t true five years ago.
Nick Sirianni hasn’t been subtle. “He is the best right tackle in the world,” the Eagles head coach has said, more than once, without hedging. “You know Lane Johnson has it taken care of on the right side. You don’t have to help him out.”
Six Pro Bowl selections (2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024). Two first-team All-Pro selections. Three second-team All-Pro nods. Two Super Bowl rings. One Madden 99 overall rating – just the fourth Eagle ever to get it. He’s appeared on the NFL Top 100 four times.
The Hall of Fame case is real and complicated at the same time. The accolades support it. Johnson himself has flagged the PED suspensions as a counterargument, which is an unusual thing for a player to do voluntarily. Voters will weigh that. The honest answer is that nobody knows yet, and the career isn’t over.
The Year He Went Public With the Anxiety
In Week 4 of the 2021 season, hours before a game against Kansas City, Lane Johnson left the team. He missed three games. The official word was a personal matter. When he came back, he sat with Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer and said what the personal matter was: he’d been living with anxiety disorder since 2008, and he needed to deal with it.
He described waking up on game days since college with panic attacks. Nausea. Throwing up before games, regardless of whether they were day games or night games. He called the anxiety a monster. “I felt like the monster just kept building and building.” He’d visited a counselor at Oklahoma but hadn’t gone further with it. For years, he played through it without telling anyone.
Going public in the NFL in 2021 was still not a neutral act. Johnson is 6-6 and 325 pounds. He plays one of the most physically demanding positions in professional sports. The image doesn’t fit the narrative around mental health that most people carry. He knew that, and he said it anyway. His closest friend on the team at the time, right guard Brandon Brooks, had dealt with similar panic attacks before games and had become an advocate earlier. The two of them had talked. Johnson had watched how the team and the league responded to Brooks with something closer to compassion than judgment – and that shaped his decision to go public.
After 2021, he kept going. He started speaking at depression treatment clinics. In November 2022, he sat in front of 25 patients, survivors, and staffers at a Success TMS clinic in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and talked about his experience in detail. He became an ambassador for Kooth, an online mental health support provider for youth in Philadelphia. He’s worked with the Travis Manion Foundation, Merging Vets and Players, Waterboys, and Feherty’s Troops First Foundation through the NFL’s My Cause My Cleats initiative. In 2023, he ran a Gold Star Families initiative, hosting families of fallen service members and Silver Star recipients – exchanges of stories about overcoming adversity, which he’s described as going both ways.
The Eagles nominated him for the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award in 2023. He was named a finalist. When the Eagles surprised him with the news, Jason Kelce – not a man who cries easily – cried. Johnson’s statement afterward: “I’ve been fortunate to spend my entire career playing for an organization and city that has embraced me at my best, but more importantly, supported me and helped me through some of my darkest moments.” He said he hoped his story opened doors for others suffering in silence. Eagles chairman Jeffrey Lurie called it courage and resiliency.
The uncomfortable thing about Johnson’s mental health story is that it ran parallel to years of elite performance. He wasn’t struggling and playing poorly. He was struggling and becoming one of the best players at his position in the league. Those two things don’t resolve cleanly into a tidy narrative.
The Philly Specials, the Bro Barn, and the Culture Wars
After Super Bowl LII in February 2018, Johnson made a comment that landed harder than he probably expected. He said the Eagles won partly because they had fun – and framed it in contrast to the Patriots’ approach, which he described as a fear-based culture. New England won six Super Bowls under Belichick. Johnson’s point wasn’t subtle. The comment got picked up everywhere and became a minor culture-war moment in NFL discourse for weeks.
He wasn’t wrong, for what it’s worth. That Eagles team had a personality that showed up in how they played. And Johnson has consistently been a central part of it.
In 2022, he, Jason Kelce, and Jordan Mailata recorded a Christmas album as a group called The Philly Specials. It was called “A Philly Special Christmas.” It sold well enough that they’ve done follow-ups. This is not something most NFL offensive linemen do, and the fact that it worked as a thing says something about all three of them. Mailata can actually sing. Kelce is impossible to make look awkward. Johnson, by his own account, just shows up and commits.
He owns Rooks Performance, a training facility and brand. In May 2019, he donated $500,000 to Kilgore College – the school that gave him his first shot – to build “The Lane,” a 3,800 square-foot athletic performance center that opened in March 2021. He attended the opening. Small-school donations from NFL players are common; half-million dollar ones to the specific community college that started the career are less so.
Contract, 2026 Season, and How Much Longer
In March 2025, three weeks after Super Bowl LIX, Johnson signed a one-year extension that added $8 million over two years and $30 million in additional guarantees. That keeps him under contract through the 2027 season. In February 2026, NFL Network’s Judy Battista reported he’ll return for a 14th season. He turned 35 in May 2025.
He missed ten games in 2025 with a foot injury. That’s worth noting honestly: the streak of durability has had interruptions, and the foot issue was significant enough that he was listed as questionable for the Wild Card game before ultimately playing. Over 168 career games, this is a man who has played through a torn adductor and numerous other injuries while producing at a consistent All-Pro level. But age and accumulated wear are real.
His personal life shifted as well. He and Chelsea Goodman, who had been married since January 2013, divorced in 2022. They have three children together. His former father-in-law is John Goodman, who played defensive end for the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1980 to 1985. In April 2025, shortly after the Super Bowl, Johnson got engaged to Kelsey Holmer, who had been his partner since at least early 2022. They married in 2026; he announced it by posting wedding photos on Instagram with no prior announcement, which is exactly the kind of move that fits his personality.
He’s been honest about how long he has left. A few years ago he said he’d thought about two more seasons, largely because of his kids – not wanting to be away from them more than he already was. He’s now past that window and still playing at a level that makes retirement a choice rather than a necessity. The 2026 season will be his 14th. Whether it’s the last one, genuinely nobody knows yet, including probably him.
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