Because of how the Eagles and Chip Kelly weathered the fallout from Riley Cooper's controversy last season, Michael Sam, who came out as an openly gay man in August, may be the team most prepared to welcme him into the locker room.
Michael Sam is about to be the answer to the question that has been hanging over the National Football League for the last several years.
Is the NFL ready for an openy gay player in their locker rooms?
As was reported in an interview with ESPN, the New York Times and OutSports, Sam revealed that he is an openly gay man, and had come out to his Missouri teammates last summer and they had kept his revelation a secret.
While there will be plenty of debate in the coming weeks and months leading up to the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis and the draft in May. His eventual destination could very well end up being the Philadelphia Eagles.
In a perfect world, Same's evaluation will come down to what happens between the white lines but finding a home for a defensive end with an SEC leading leading 11.5 sacks and 19 tackles for loss with jaded glasses because of weak competition in games against Vanderbilt and Florida, as well as less than ideal size to play defensive end in a 4-3 scheme. Yet, this is not a perfect world and his sexual orientation will hold weight in evaluations of how adding him to the chemistry of locker rooms across the league will skew the chemistry already in place.
That is where Chip Kelly and the Eagles come into play.
Billy Davis' defense runs a 3-4 and it seems as though a priority this offseason has been adding to a pass rush that struggled to get to the quarterback, and bolster a special teams unit that were deficient in the waning moments of a playoff loss to the New Orleans Saints and inconsistent at best all season long.
Sam's reputation is that of a player who is coachable and team first, which would likely mean he would be open to contributing on special teams. He has the size at 6'2, 260 pounds to be athletic enough to contribute on special teams and be at the very least a rotational pass rusher on defense.
Where the Eagles may be the best fit for Sam is within a locker room that already has weathered the storm of controversy in Kelly's first season.
Much was made last summer over Riley Cooper using a racial slur on video at a Kenny Chesney concert and how the Eagles players eventually forgave-if not unanimously, enough to allow him to live amongst them as teammates-which allowed Cooper to have the kind of season where he flourished to the tune of a career best 47 catches for 835 yards and eight touchdowns.
Kelly deserves much of the credit for keeping the threads of this locker room woven together when it could have tattered in the fallout of the Cooper storm in his first season as head coach.
This is a head coach who also led his Oregon Ducks in the wake of the Legarrette Blount punching a player in a 2009 loss to Boise State.
Where Sam is different from these cases is that he has done absolutely nothing wrong except for being a different kind of individual from the other 52 players he will share a locker room with, in the same vein of Jackie Robinson's assault on the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947.
Before Sunday's announcement, Sam was projected as a second or third-round draft pick in many mock drafts, but the immediate fallout among head coaches and general managers across the league seem to indicate a fall into the deeper rounds for the Mizzou product.
If he's available in the fifth round or later, it's not difficult to imagine his phone ringing with Kelly on the other end of the line.
The Eagles may or may not being the right fit schematically for Sam's skillset, but unlike many other locker rooms across the league, the progressive thinking of the organization as well as the head coach and a locker room that has proven an ability to withstand a media circus as well as racial tension in the span of a season, may be the most prepared to welcome Sam.
