Part 1 of 1 in Go Birds: The Guys Who Became Ours

There are 78 men on the Philadelphia Eagles roster right now. They are the team we root for any given Sunday. They are our home team and, on any arbitrary encounter both offline and online, you would not be surprised to hear "Go Birds". What I find particularly fascinating is how few (none) of the Eagles' line-up is from Philly, and only one from Pennsylvania. That's not entirely surprising, since most of the NFL draws from Texas, Florida, and California - both because they're large states and because they have competitive, well-funded and elite early age football programs, that feed into top football colleges.

What's cool thoguh - and important for the culture of Philly - is that that's OK that they're not from here. They are here, they play for us, and they're Philadelphians. Even cooler, some of them remain Philadelphians in spirit even if their career and lives take them elsewhere such as longtime QB Donovan McNabb, who I think now lives in Arizona.

I wanted to understand the origins of our home team a little bit more systematically, so pulled the data from ESPN to understand the city/state the Birds' players were born in - their origins as it were. The number that came back was 73 — seventy-three different cities hatched baby eagles (technically, "eaglets") who would go on to play for Philly.

Let's start with our starting quarterback, because Jalen Hurts was born in Houston. Three other guys on this team were born in Houston too, and three more were born in Fort Worth, which is on the other side of Texas.

Which is a fun fact, but the thing I keep coming back to is that there is no place and no region — these 78 did not come from anywhere in particular, no city claims them, and Texas, the biggest single state on the list, is still only 12 of 78, which is not what a farm system looks like. It didn't assemble itself out of a pipeline. Houston didn't send us a contingent (although, to be fair, six Houston guys is not nothing), Houston sent us a quarterback, and then some guys. Four things in it kept pulling on me.

Four states send 40 of the 78, and the six states next door send five

Texas has 12, Florida 11, Georgia 9 and California 8, which is 40 of the 78 players, just over half the roster, out of four states, and after that the whole map goes quiet. Illinois has 4, three states have 3, four have 2, and 14 of them contributed exactly one player each. The chart below has the whole thing.

The part that actually surprised me is the six states that touch Pennsylvania. New Jersey has 2 and Maryland has 3, and New York, Delaware, West Virginia and Ohio have nobody on this roster at all, which is five players out of 78 for an entire region.

But the five aren't even from the cities you'd guess. Philadelphia, by far the biggest city in that corridor, produced none of them. Two of Maryland's three were born in Silver Spring and Upper Marlboro, which is Washington metro, about 120 miles south of here.

Seventy-three cities for seventy-eight players, and two of them are named Dallas

The repeats are Houston (3), Fort Worth (3) and Dallas (2), and that is the whole list, which means 70 of these guys are the only person on this team from the city they were born in.

The Dallas one is my favorite, because there are two of them. There is a Dallas, Texas, which is Xavier Gipson, and there is a Dallas, Georgia, which is a small town about an hour east of Atlanta that has never once in its life been inside the Dallas–Fort Worth metro, and that one is Smael Mondon Jr. Same name, different state, 700 miles apart, and both of them are on this roster right now, which is the kind of thing that makes you wonder what else is hiding in this list.

There is more hiding. There is a Cleveland, Mississippi on this roster (Markel Bell is from it), and the Cleveland you were picturing when you looked at the map is not it — Cleveland, Ohio is 700 miles away and produced nobody. And there is a town called Iowa in Louisiana, which is where Andre' Sam is from, so Iowa turns up on this list twice and half the time it is a place and half the time it is a state. There is also, separately, an Iowa the state, which put exactly one Eagle on this roster, out of a town called Odebolt.

I don't know what any of that adds up to. I just know that I had to stop and read the list twice.

(One thing to hold onto: this is where ESPN lists these guys as being born, and most of them moved somewhere between age four and age 22. It's the start of the story, not the whole of it.)

The one Pennsylvanian went to Penn State, so the pipeline runs through a school, not a hometown

I wanted to check whether that one PA player was a coincidence of a name and a ZIP code, so I looked at where all 78 went to college. Three of them went to Penn State — Barkley from Coplay, and Arnold Ebiketie from Silver Spring and Tariq Castro-Fields from Upper Marlboro, both of whom you will notice are Marylanders. So the one Pennsylvanian on this roster is genuinely the only one, and the pipeline feeding him at Penn State is mostly Maryland.

Which is, I think, the actual answer to how 78 guys ended up being ours. Not one of them came through us. Alabama put five of them on this roster and Alabama is in Tuscaloosa, Oklahoma put two here and Oklahoma is in Norman, and Georgia put six here and Georgia is in Athens. Every one of these players grew up somewhere else, played somewhere else, and was coached by a staff that has never once had Philadelphia in the conversation while doing it, and then at some point somebody in a building here made them an offer. That's the whole pipeline, and Philadelphia is the last stop in it rather than the first.

Which is not how I expected this to go, honestly. I wanted to find a hometown in here somewhere.

Four of them were born outside the country, and one of them is from Sydney

Seventy-four of the 78 were born in the United States. The other four are one Australian and three African, which is why 26 state labels on this roster resolve to 25 US states plus New South Wales.

The Sydney one I had to read twice. Jordan Mailata was born in Sydney and never played college football in America at all, he came up through Australian rugby league, which is a completely different door into this building. Andrew Mukuba was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and went to the University of Texas, so somebody in that recruiting office must have had a moment with that one. And there are two more after that, Uar Bernard from Abuja and Joshua Weru from Nairobi.

(One caution on the one out of 78, since it is the number people will quote: it is tempting to read this as the city no longer producing football players, and that is not what it says. The city produces them. It just produces them, and then somebody else signs them, and by the time they're 22 there is nothing left to check but the map. The roster also moves — this is the 2026 roster as of the cache date, not franchise history, and one trade changes the denominator.)

Back to the map, though, because it is worth one more look. Seventy-three cities, twenty-six state labels, three of these guys born in Africa and one in Sydney, a quarterback out of Houston, and a running back out of a borough of 3,000 people north of Allentown. Not one of them is from this city - and yet, every one of them is part of this city.

That is the part my fancy charts and analysis can't show. Where someone comes from does not define what they become a part of. Seventy-eight strangers coming from all over the US, and even Africa and Australia, somehow ended up here playing America's favorite sport for America's Greatest City.

Running Back Saquon Barkley is the one guy out of seventy-eight who was born in this state (and he also went to high school and college in Pennsylvania too, before signing with the Eagles). But the other 77 guys are just as much Eagles as he is!

Go Birds.

Notes, Sources, and Methodology

Roster data is ESPN’s public Philadelphia Eagles roster feed, cached October 9, 2026. Every player on the roster has a birth city and 75 of the 78 also have a birth state. The three without one — Uar Bernard (Abuja), Andrew Mukuba (Harare) and Joshua Weru (Nairobi) — were born outside the United States, and the feed carries no state field for them. College attended comes from the same feed.

Two choices worth naming. State names are normalized to two-letter codes so that “Pennsylvania” and “PA” can’t split the same state into two buckets, and Philadelphia city and Philadelphia county are counted separately even though they are the same jurisdiction in Pennsylvania’s consolidated city-county, so both come back zero.

The map is an Albers equal-area projection, the standard for US thematic maps, because a geographic map reads as geography in a way a grid of squares does not. Shading uses a single-hue green ramp on fixed buckets rather than scaling the darkest shade to whatever the busiest state happens to be, so a given shade means the same thing every time the roster is re-pulled.