Tanner McKee is known as a positive presence. The Eagles will need their new QB1 to keep spirits high in trying times.
It's McKee's show under center for the foreseeable future. His teammates and those who have coached him describe an upbeat competitor who inspires confidence with his command.
Little did Walt Whitman know that when he wrote the line, “I contain multitudes,” in his poem “Song of Myself” in 1855, he would help explain the dichotomy that exists within a 26-year-old Eagles quarterback over 170 years later.
Tavita Pritchard said he quickly learned of the “multitudes” within Tanner McKee as his offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Stanford, when McKee arrived as a freshman in 2020. Off the field, Pritchard described McKee as “one of the most positive people” who was so personable and gregarious that he could strike up a conversation with anybody.
But when he stepped on the field, the 6-foot-6, 231-pound quarterback flipped the switch on his demeanor.
“He’s a freaking killer on the field, man,” said Pritchard, who is now Stanford’s head coach. “He is as competitive a person as I’ve been around. He is somebody who absolutely wants to dominate the opponent.”
Those disparate qualities within McKee, the Eagles’ 2023 sixth-rounder, haven’t changed. If anything, they’ve become even more evident as he has stepped into the starting role on a full-time basis in the absence of Jalen Hurts, who could miss the rest of the season after he was diagnosed with blood clots in his lungs.
Despite being McKee’s teammate for the last four seasons, Jordan Mailata is just now getting extended exposure to his on-field personality. Mailata, the Eagles’ starting left tackle since 2020, hasn’t taken nearly as many snaps with McKee under center over the years as he has with Hurts. Over the last week and a half, Mailata is beginning to understand what the second-unit offensive linemen have been telling him about McKee and his presence in the huddle.
“There’s a switch,” Mailata said. “He’s [a] very positive, friendly guy, but then when he’s out there, the urgency goes up tenfold, and he’s a different guy out there. The urgency, you see it, the fire, the command of, like, ‘Everybody, refocus.’ To me, he snaps me back out of it. If he can see visually that I’m not in it, he’ll bring me back in.”
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McKee must now bring everyone back in. As the starter moving forward, McKee will be tasked with helping an inefficient Eagles offense that ranks 30th in the NFL in expected points added per play (minus-.21, according to Next Gen Stats) rebound in a wide-open NFC East. He will look to snap the Eagles’ four-game losing skid, too, beginning with their Monday Night Football matchup against the Dallas Cowboys (8:15 p.m., 6abc and ESPN).
He was inconsistent in the first non-Week 18 start of his career last week against the Carolina Panthers, going 26-for-45 (57.8% completion) for 215 yards and a touchdown. But unlike last week, when McKee learned that he would start just three days before the game, offensive coordinator Sean Mannion now has the benefit of a full week of game-planning around McKee.
McKee has shown that he is capable of flipping the switch within. Can he help flip the switch on the Eagles’ season?
“The last couple months, probably month, [is] weighing on everyone,” Mailata said. “But having Tanner under center and just his infectious energy has helped a lot.”
‘Unflappable’ in the face of adversity
For better or worse, McKee is well-acquainted with taking over at quarterback in less-than-ideal situations.
In 2020, his freshman year at Stanford amid the COVID-19 pandemic, McKee saw his first game action in the season opener on the road against No. 12 Oregon. He found out that he would get playing time just hours before kickoff.
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Davis Mills, the starter at the time and now a Houston Texans backup, had an inconclusive COVID-19 test. Despite testing negative multiple times after an initial false positive, former Stanford head coach David Shaw found out that he still couldn’t play Mills. The process delayed the Cardinal’s eventual decision to pivot to a quarterback tandem of junior Jack West and McKee, a freshman who had recently returned from serving a 21-month LDS mission in Brazil.
“He was not moved, in the best sense of that,” Pritchard said. “He was like, ‘OK, great, here we go. Can we go walk through these plays?’”
And so they did, in a parking adjacent to Autzen Stadium. They tried to hide behind a trailer that carried Stanford’s equipment so that nobody could see them rehearsing their plays. While Stanford lost, 35-14, McKee flashed in his debut, especially when he flaunted his arm on a 46-yard deep post for current Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Simi Fehoko late in the third quarter.
In theory, Shaw could’ve just gone with West, who was more experienced and knew the offense better. But he had been excited to finally see McKee play.
“I’d waited since his senior year of high school,” said Shaw, who is now the passing game specialist for the Detroit Lions. “Waited from going on a mission for those two years, and we had that opportunity to play him, and knew that it wasn’t going to take away from his eligibility. We said, ‘Hey, gosh, I got to see this kid go out there and play.’ And [he] threw one of the most beautiful balls of the game. And I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we have to look forward to once this kid is really ready to take over.’”
Shaw also continued to see the maturity that McKee possessed before he began his career at Stanford, and even before he went on his mission in Brazil. He overcame melanoma when he was 16 years old. It didn’t take long for Shaw to understand early in their relationship when Stanford was recruiting McKee out of Centennial High School in Corona, Calif., that he was a fighter.
“This is a young man that’s been through a lot, and has remained a high caliber person, and at the same time, a tough, tough, tough competitor,” Shaw said.
In 2021, McKee won the starting job and showed that he was “unflappable” in the face of big moments, Pritchard said. In the first start of his career at the helm of unranked Stanford against No. 14 USC, he went 16-for-23 for 234 yards and two passing touchdowns, plus one rushing touchdown. He became the 13th FBS quarterback since 2012 to beat a ranked opponent on the road in their first career start.
He followed that up two weeks later with a stellar performance in a rematch with No. 3 Oregon. After taking a shot to the ribs on the final drive, McKee missed one play and returned to action. He threw the game-tying touchdown as the clock expired in regulation, then tossed another in overtime to win, 31-24. Shaw never doubted that McKee would return after taking the hit that sidelined him.
“When you know what he’s been through, that was very, very minor,” Shaw said. “The moment he was going to get cleared, he was going to go out there with no hesitation and go out and grip it and rip it.”
With the highs came the lows. Stanford won just six games with McKee as the starter over the course of two seasons. Shaw lamented the Cardinal’s inability to play better football around McKee, although he still knew he would have a chance to play at the NFL level.
Regardless, McKee was an “eternal optimist,” Pritchard said, in the face of adversity. Positivity can turn into negativity if it’s funny, according to Shaw, but that wasn’t the case with McKee.
“Positivity has to have gravity,” Shaw said. “So I say that in such a way that people that have been through difficult things and have found a way to be positive, they can exude that positivity with gravity, with earnestness, and be able to step in the huddle and say, ‘Hey, that wasn’t good enough. We’ve got to be better. Come on, guys,’ and lifting people up and bringing people along comes very natural to him.
“And there’s a genuine feeling that the guys get from him that this is someone that they can follow, this is someone that they can trust, this is someone that’s in the battle with them.”
‘I want the guys to trust me’
Roughly seven weeks ago, McKee learned that Andy Dalton would serve as the backup to Hurts going into the season opener against the Washington Commanders.
McKee recalled a conversation that he had with Parks Frazier, the Eagles quarterbacks coach, that day. Frazier told him that nothing would really change from a day-to-day perspective for McKee as the third-string quarterback. The backup competition would continue, and McKee would go through his typical process of preparation every week.
“That’s kind of the way that I approached it, taking it day-by-day, being able to take a step back and let me just focus on today,” McKee said. “Let me focus on this first meeting. Let me focus on this next walkthrough, then this next practice. I feel like that helped my mindset a ton, and still preparing and being ready if something was going to happen, if I was going to get an opportunity.”
He continued to prepare as if he was one injury away from game action. In reality, he was an interception and an injury away, as he took over QB2 duties in the game following Dalton’s pick in the Week 3 loss to the Chicago Bears, then was promoted to the starting job when Hurts was indefinitely sidelined due to the blood clots discovered in his lungs.
Even when he was the backup, McKee was expected to be the leader in the huddle with the scout team and ensure that everyone was on the same page. Now that he’s the starter, he said he’s “taken an extra step forward” in those duties.
“I want the guys to trust me,” McKee said. “I want the guys to know that when I go in there, they have full confidence that the offense is going to run smoothly.”
McKee is building that trust through his preparation, his leadership, and his trademark sense of positivity. Right tackle Markel Bell said it’s clear that McKee knows his stuff, and his authority in the huddle helps everyone get on the same page. Mailata also noted that one of the benefits of having a full week to practice with McKee is getting used to his cadence, which helps the offensive linemen avoid committing false starts.
Rookie quarterback Cole Payton isn’t in the huddle with McKee, of course, but when he watches tape back from practice, the difference between his laid-back demeanor off the field and his assertive one in the huddle is stark. Britain Covey said that McKee is a little bit more vocal than Hurts is in the huddle, which is by design. The 29-year-old receiver said he thinks McKee is trying to “over-communicate” his confidence to his receivers, so he doesn’t leave any of them guessing about how he is feeling at any given moment, especially because some of them don’t have much experience playing with him.
“He threw a bad pass today in practice, and immediately he’s coming in the huddle, taking ownership, saying, ‘My bad,’ and hyping guys up,” Covey said. “And that kind of confidence is contagious. We just need to be better for him than we were this last week.”
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McKee has another opportunity against the Cowboys to prove he can run the offense, albeit potentially without DeVonta Smith and Dontayvion Wicks, who have been sidelined this week with hamstring and ankle injuries, respectively. Saquon Barkley, who has been out for the last two weeks with a hamstring injury, is eyeing a return against the Cowboys, providing some hope that the team can get the run game going and, in turn, spark the play-action pass game.
They failed to achieve that objective in Barkley’s absence against the Panthers. Still, Mannion emphasized his belief in McKee’s ability to execute his West Coast-style system. Mannion said McKee has been getting “better and better” within the offense, and now, he has the full week of reps as the starter to get comfortable within it.
“I think he’s really sharp mentally, he’s accurate, [and] he gets the ball out of his hands quickly,” Mannion said. “I think he does all the things that you ask of a quarterback in terms of his presnap operation, and being able to use his cadence [and] being able to handle things at the line of scrimmage if you need adjustments. I think he’s strong in a lot of those areas, and I think it opens up some things for us offensively.”
Shaw watched last week’s game against the Panthers and saw many of those same attributes within his former quarterback that Mannion covets. After all, they were the same qualities that stuck out to Shaw when McKee was in high school — his stature in the pocket, his quick release, and his accuracy.
The personnel around McKee may change yet again this week, but Shaw knows how stabilizing his presence can be in challenging moments.
“As a former coach and fan of Tanner, you’re like, ‘Oh man, I wish they were a little bit healthier around him,’” Shaw said. “But at the same time, you watch some of those plays, and you see him moving the pocket and get the ball out of his hands. You see him point the protection and run the offense.
“And I watch that, I watch him operate the offense with a lot of pride.”
Even with all the injuries and ineffectiveness through six games, Sean Mannion is still a believer in the Eagles’ offense, saying the problems are “totally fixable.” The Inquirer’s Jeff McLane and Marcus Hayes have some thoughts on the state of Mannion’s group, as well as a defensive unit that’s also been underwhelming this season. Listen here.
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